A survivor of a rat-borne virus has shared her harrowing journey, detailing how a brush with a deadly disease left her in a coma and facing severe long-term consequences. The experience was both life-threatening and transformative, pushing her to the brink but ultimately leading to a profound recovery.
Jennifer Benewiat, now 43, recounted her ordeal to the Daily Mail, describing the intense ICU psychosis she endured and the painstaking process of relearning basic daily activities, such as walking and showering, after contracting hantavirus nearly 16 years ago.
In December 2010, during the Christmas season, Benewiat, a mother of three from Kansas, fell ill with the virus. The illness struck after a drive from Hutchinson to Wichita, where she collapsed at her doorstep, prompting a swift hospitalization. Medical professionals soon warned her of the grim possibility that her life was in peril.
As her condition worsened, Benewiat was placed on a ventilator for ten days, a lifesaving measure that left her body paralyzed from the neck down. The days spent in the hospital were a blur, as she has no memory of that critical time.
Emerging from this ordeal, Benewiat faced the daunting challenge of relearning everyday functions, a stark reminder of the virus’s severity, which carries a 40 percent mortality rate. Her story is a testament to resilience and the human spirit’s ability to overcome even the most dire circumstances.
She does not remember anything during those days in hospital and had to be taught ‘all the things a normal person does in a day’ again during her recovery from the virus, which has a 40 percent fatality rate.
Benewiat told the Daily Mail that she had ‘a little bit of a trauma kind of response’ when she heard about the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship that has left three dead and put America on alert as it monitors patients with potential symptoms.
Benewiat said she still feels the effects of hantavirus in her daily life, despite having overcome the illness more than a decade ago. ‘I have muscle weakness and numbness and tingling in my extremities,’ she told the Daily Mail.
Jennifer Benewiat, 43, contracted the hantavirus in December 2010 and was placed on a ventilator, with doctors telling her she might die
A rendering of hantavirus under a microscope. So far three people have died in the cruise ship outbreak
The hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship (pictured) has left 10 sickened and put the world on alert as it monitors whether the virus will spread
She is now able to do everything she did before but admitted: ‘I just can’t do them as quickly as I used to do.
‘Doing housework and stuff like that, I have to take breaks more often than I used to.’
Benewiat described how she felt after collapsing at her door. ‘I was exhausted and had a fever, but I had work the next day, so I figured I would sleep it off and be fine in the morning,’ she said.
However, this did not happen. Benewiat woke up hours later, vomiting and with her fever peaking even higher – at more than 103 degrees.
Her sister, KJ, rushed her to the hospital in the morning but all the tests performed on Benewiat ‘found nothing.’
‘Everything was negative no flu, no nothing. The doctor was as puzzled as I was,’ she told the Daily Mail.
Benewiat was sent home with medicine to relieve her symptoms only to feel even worse the following day.
That time, Benewiat’s mom rushed her to the emergency room, where her oxygen began dropping precipitously.
Passengers are sprayed with disinfectant by Spanish government officials before boarding a plane after disembarking from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius at Tenerife airport on May 10
Benewiat, pictured with her three sons, told the Daily Mail she had to relearn how to walk, eat and shower after contracting the rat virus more than a decade ago
Benewiat said she felt scared because she had no idea what was happening to her.
‘They couldn’t tell me what was going on because they didn’t know,’ she said. ‘All they knew was that I wasn’t breathing right and so they had to do something to help me breathe.’
Benewiat said her body was ‘rejecting all of the treatment’ and she was not tested for hantavirus until one of her Sedgwick County Jail colleagues, Audrey Griffin, recognized her symptoms.
Griffin was from the Four Corners area – where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet – and where a hantavirus outbreak took place in 1993, killing 27 people nationwide.
Benewiat’s test took 10 days to come back and she was placed on a ventilator the entire time.
‘During that 10 day period, I don’t remember anything,’ Benewiat told the Daily Mail. ‘Even when I was awake and aware, I don’t remember any of it.’
The doctors eventually confirmed she had hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which stunned her.
‘I’d never heard about it. When they told me what it was, I was like, ‘What is that? How did I get that?’
Some of the last passengers of the MV Hondius depart for the airport to leave from Granadilla Port in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, on May 11
Eventually, Benewiat’s parents decided to insert a tracheostomy tube into her neck, as the ventilator was not meant to be long term.
Then, Benewiat’s fortunes suddenly changed. ‘The doctors came to do the tube and, to everyone’s amazement, I started to breathe on my own,’ she said.
Benewiat said she does not remember anything until two days after being taken off the ventilator.
She said she suffered from ICU psychosis, where she was ‘seeing things and hearing things and I was just kind of crazy there for a few days.’
Benewiat told the Daily Mail she lost about 65 pounds and that her subsequent rehabilitation at a Wichita center was ‘very, very, very, very difficult.’
‘The first day I was there, they immediately tried to get me the stand and my legs weren’t working,’ Benewiat recalled.
She added: ‘It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Imagine a baby having to learn to crawl or walk.’
Benewiat said it took her one month to walk well enough that she could be supported by a walker.
The MV Hondius cruise ship leaving the port of Granadilla de Abona in Tenerife, Spain, on May 11
‘It was painful,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘A learning experience.’
Benewiat also had to learn how feed herself and shower again, which took an additional month of ‘intense’ therapy.
To this day, it is still unclear how and where Benewiat contracted hantavirus.
‘The health department came out to my home, and they came out to my work at the jail, and they never found anything that could say it was definitely there,’ she told the Daily Mail.
However she posed her own hypothesis. ‘I did go to a Christmas tree farm two weeks prior to getting sick, so my sister and my mom thought they kind of narrowed it down to that time period,’ Benewiat told the Daily Mail. ‘But I don’t know for sure.’
The current hantavirus outbreak relates to the Andes strain which can be passed person-to-person but Benewiat had a different strain – the Sin Nombre virus that is contracted from inhaling virus particles shed in the urine, droppings, or saliva of infected deer mice.
A bus carrying passengers caught up in the MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak arrives at a purpose-built quarantine facility located on the outskirts of Perth, Australia on May 15
Forty-one Americans across 16 states are now being monitored for hantavirus symptoms.
So far 10 people from the cruise ship have fallen sick from the virus including the three who have died.
Before the outbreak was identified on the cruise ship, 29 passengers disembarked from the Hondius on Saint Helena on April 24 – the destination marking the end of the first leg of the trip.
Health authorities are rushing to identify any potential contact cases who may have contracted the virus from those who left the ship before the virus was identified.
According to the CDC, as of the end of 2023, 890 cases of hantavirus were reported in the United States since surveillance began in 1993.
