If the disease doesn’t kill Jake, the medical system just might. As his condition worsens, he endures brutal treatment and increasing isolation while tensions explode between his family and his wife. But when he finally slips into a coma, the real nightmare begins—trapped in silence, Jake overhears something chilling. Content warning: Drug use/abuse, addiction, medical trauma, serious illness, paralysis/coma, death & dying, domestic violence, assault, murder, emotional distress & mature content. Resources can be found on our website, blinkthepodcast.com Blink is part of The Binge - subscribe to The Binge to get new episodes of Blink one-week early and all episodes completely ad-free. Just Hit ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Blink show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices . . . . . Hosted and produced by Corinne Vien Co-created by Jake Haendel Original composition by Michael Marguet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the content warnings for this podcast?
Blink is intended for mature audiences as it discusses topics that can be upsetting, such as drug use, sexual assault, and emotional and physical violence. Content warnings for each episode are included in the show notes. Resources for drug addiction and domestic abuse can be found in the show notes and on our website, BlankThePodcast.com.
The testimonies and opinions expressed by guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or affiliates of this podcast. Any individuals mentioned in the episode are presumed innocent until proven guilty in the court of law unless explicitly stated otherwise. Fear.
It's a primal emotion that has been an inseparable part of the human experience since the dawn of our existence. It is both a protector and a tormentor, guiding us away from danger while often chaining us to our anxieties. Fear keeps us safe. Yet, when it comes to our health, fear does not necessarily aid in our survival. You have a rare disease that's eating away at your brain.
You're given six months to live. And no, this is not your search results on WebMD. But being told this is certainly scary, and it's a reminder of just how little control we have, and a reminder of the impermanence of life, the fragility of our bodies. Sometimes diseases cannot be conquered, and fear cannot be overcome. Dark, I know, but this is what happened to Jake.
Just weeks earlier, Jake's life was normal. Well, I mean, as normal as it could be. He lived at home with his wife. He went to work every day. He spent time with friends and family. He took romantic getaways and he traveled frequently. But Jake was also an addict and his addiction resulted in an extremely rare brain disease, a death sentence. His body shut down at a rapid speed.
A few weeks was all it took for Jake to go from walking and talking to relying on others to carry him and make all the medical decisions. Jake and those around him struggled to figure out what to do for him in the short window of time they had before Jake would inevitably become paralyzed, slip into a coma, and die. Losing Jake. Now, that was a fear that was shared by everyone around him.
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Chapter 2: What happens when Jake receives his diagnosis?
Or so he thought. This is Blank. I'm your host, Corinne Vienne.
I'm Jake Handel. This is my story. I was becoming horribly contracted I couldn't walk to the bathroom I had to be carried I was in extreme pain so it wasn't like some rosy picnic eating blueberries My wife, Ellen, is advocating pretty strongly with the therapist in coming up with these ideas, strategies. She wouldn't accept there's nothing. She's like, what about this?
She would like look up things online. And she found Spalding Rehab. And I never heard of Spalding in my life. And she was advocating to get me into Spalding Rehab.
Spalding Rehab, the third best rehabilitation hospital in the U.S., which just so happens to be in Boston, where Jake lives. But Jake wasn't able to get into Spalding quite yet. At this moment in time, he was being cared for by Fairlawn Rehabilitation Hospital. And over the next few months, Jake would transfer from hospital to hospital.
He'd spend time in different rehab centers and even spend time at home. Throughout this time, his wife continued to advocate for him.
She had this great ability to sense what I wanted. I thought that was amazing, this telepathy connection. And she could just know things when no one else knew things. She always decorated my room pretty festively, tried to do like fun things. She brought a bunch of her girlfriends over and they brought some karaoke machine and they were like singing karaoke for me. It was kind of cool.
I remember some family coming to Fairlawn, and particularly my Uncle Michael. He was someone I was always very close to and had a partying relationship with, among other things. Shout out, Uncle Mike. What up, big dog? He had like a pint of Smirnoff vodka with him. This pissed my wife off so much. Even though I was in like no place to, you know, drink, everything has to be kept away from Jake.
So there was like this kind of beginning of certain people aren't allowed around Jake anymore.
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Chapter 3: How did Jake’s wife advocate for his treatment?
I have to say, I saw a lot of myself in Ellen in this moment. Your husband is dying in front of you. He's given six months to live, many of which he will be in a coma. You're trying your best to cope and to find any treatment to slow down time. And then you have to witness people stride into the hospital room for an hour or so and so clearly not take Jake's safety seriously. Hell no.
I think I would likely ban people, too. It had only been a month since Jake's diagnosis, and he was still declining rapidly. His speech was slurred, his body began contorting, and he was unable to walk to the bathroom without two people on either side of him. But Jake continued to work diligently, giving it his all in his daily physical therapy and speech therapy sessions.
Despite the hours of daily rehab, Jake didn't qualify with his insurance to stay at Fairlawn. He needed to demonstrate that he was making progress. But in Jake's case, progress did not mean improvement. Rather, he worked to slow the progression of the disease to delay the inevitable.
When given the option between moving to a nursing facility or going into at-home care, Jake and his wife decided that they should have him transferred to a nursing facility. In retrospect, if this disease didn't kill Jake, some of the things that could happen at these facilities just might.
It was called Parsons Hill, referred to as Parsons Hell. I was definitely concerned. I get put on a TBI floor for traumatic brain injury. And there were a lot of drug addicts and people that yelled a lot and freaked out. I saw immediately what they called a person's health. And all the while, I'm deteriorating even more. I couldn't really pee, even though I felt the urge.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Jake face during rehabilitation?
My fingers were curling in, my ankles were stretching out, and I was starting to have these contractures, which are very painful. It feels like someone's pulling and molding your bones and tendons like clay. They were adding about five medications per week to my care plan. Stuff for anxiety, stuff for pain. Kind of like heavy narcotic pain meds that I thought were fun.
Just like this whole array of medicines to treat different symptoms I was having. Nothing was working. It was the 4th of July. At this point, I need to hit the nurse call button for every single thing I needed. But this person's hell, and they're on your staff. No one's coming in, and I'm really thirsty. I'm able to sit up on the side of my bed, and there's a cup of water on the bureau.
And I go to reach for it, and I have no stability, and I just fall like a sack of potatoes, right? And I hit my head on the bureau, and I slid up to the floor, and everything went black. I thought I had died. Apparently, it was like a bloody mess. All I remember is my eyes kind of like come to and this guy's over and he's like, you're okay, you're okay, you're going to be okay.
And I'm like, am I dead? It was such a weird sensation in my body of this like tingling and everything was numb and it was like my body was humming. And now my wife and my dad happened to be walking in as all this is happening. I remember she comes into the room all kind of gung-ho and happy and immediately is like, what? Oh my God. How did you let this happen to my husband? Where's the ambulance?
An ambulance did arrive and it transported Jake to a new hospital. This time he was at UMass Memorial Medical Center.
All I know from that moment forward, my left side was never the same. It was kind of numbish and not responding. Not like I throw the ball too much nowadays, you know. We can show you guys on camera how that would go. I'd aim for Gordon's head and I'd break that window. Strong-willed and insanely amazing advocate wifey was like, you're not going back there.
Makes sense. It was likely in this moment that his wife lost the trust of these types of medical facilities because the next move that they made was to transfer Jake home. Medical staff would come and they would aid in Jake's care, but really his wife and his dad were his primary caretakers, with a lot of the weight landing on Ellen's shoulders.
A terribly difficult responsibility to take on, but at least she would have eyes on Jake and know that he was safe.
It was hard because I was a full-time job.
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Chapter 5: How did Jake's condition affect his relationship with his wife?
Yeah. She was like, I can't do this. I can't do this. I feel like I'm raping you. And I'm like, but you're not. Like, I feel like I'm hurting you. I feel like I'm raping you.
I imagine it would be hard to be a caretaker and to spend so much time just trying to keep someone alive and keep someone safe and comfortable and then to switch and view them sexually and romantically.
I'm sure it was very hard. It was hard for her. It was very hard for me. But I really was in so much pain. My skin was burning. Simple touch could hurt. She would only touch me with the glove. I'm not going to say I didn't enjoy it or anything, but it also felt to me like she felt it was another one of her tasks. It's like, get this out of the way.
It would make me tense my body up and my fingers were approaching close to my palms and my nails would start digging in and spasms and my contractures would hurt.
Okay, so maybe a physical connection of this kind was not the best idea. But Jake told me that he wouldn't have said no, that it hurt too much, because he really wanted that familiarity. He wanted something to feel remotely normal, even if it wasn't. Everything in Jake's life was different. His body was a stranger to him. His relationship with his wife irrevocably changed.
And he continued to progressively lose his ability to speak. Needing more care, Jake's mother-in-law utilized her connections to connect Jake with Dr. Naga Kapal Vena. Dr. Vena is the chief of neuroimmunology and neuroinfectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, MGH.
Dr. Vena is a world-renowned neurologist and an expert in neuroinfectious diseases, and he is one of the nation's leading experts in neurological complications. So, a good guy to get in with. Within a week, Jake had an appointment.
My mother-in-law and wife really ran the conversation. And again, my wife at the time was an excellent advocate and she was getting all these ideas to ask Fana. And it was about an hour of them just like talking, me just kind of laying in a stretcher. She's like, do you have any questions for him? And I kind of like come closer because I can't talk loud. And I go, ask him if I'm going to die.
She goes, he wants to know if you think he's going to die. And I'm looking at this man right in the eyes. I was studying his facial expressions to kind of like gauge if I thought he was telling me what I wanted to hear or not. He looked puzzled, a genuine puzzled look of like, why would this guy even ask me such a thing? And then like went to like, no, I don't think so.
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Chapter 6: What significant events occurred on Jake's birthday?
Do you know how many times this happened to you?
I would say from November-ish 2017 to February 2019, I stormed every day. The rapid change in body temperature was wild. I remember they were bringing in a team of like eight people. They're like, oh my God, we got to get this. Tim down, his brain is going to melt. They get me in a Hoyer lift. You know what a Hoyer lift is?
No.
A Hoyer lift. If you're bed bound and can't be moved, it's like a pad that goes under you that has all these like tethers. And they bring this machine. It's almost like a human forklift.
I'm picturing when they save the whales and they like transport whales back into.
I'm like, save Willie. Free Willie.
Free Jakey.
Free Jakey. They put me in a heating blanket. It was like ridiculous. And then I start to notice no one's really talking to me. Nurses, doctors would come in. Hi, I'm Dr. Harrell. I'm here to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hi, I'm your nurse, Jan. How you doing today? I'm here to change your IV. All that stopped. And people would come in and work and they wouldn't say anything.
There are two nurses that are coming in to clean me up because obviously when you're paralyzed and bed bound, you just kinda go to the bathroom whenever. And they're coming in to like clean up this situation that I'm sure wasn't pretty. One's on either side of my hospital bed. I can only see them when they like lean in. So I kinda have a sense of who's there.
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Chapter 7: What led to Jake needing a tracheostomy?
My dad, he was getting berated by her a lot, getting calls while he was at work, do this, pick up this. And by the way, go to the pharmacy and pick up my meds. She was the boss. I think my dad was probably like, fuck this, you know?
On Chinese New Year, Doran attended a staff party at the restaurant where he worked, the restaurant that he drove delivery for. They had set out a mouth-watering spread, and Doran was really excited to have a chance to relax a bit, to socialize, to eat some free food. But he wasn't supposed to stay long because he had a 12-hour shift scheduled right after this to care for Jake.
I just remember her footsteps, boom, boom, boom, boom, storming around the house, making calls on speakerphone to my dad. It going to voicemail, leaving messages like, where the fuck are you? You're 45 minutes late. So enraged. And then I hear the door open. And I hear footsteps coming. And I hear my wife screaming at him. Screaming. And I hear my dad going, why are you so mad?
Just, I'm here, sorry, I'm here. And then I hear, are you drunk? You smell like alcohol. And then I hear, you're strangling me, you're strangling me. And then I hear a bottle pop, not like a glass bottle breaking, like A two-liter Coke bottle being boffed off someone's head. And then I hear a human being tumbling down the stairs, crashing into the door. And I hear my dad's mumbles. Ugh, ugh.
I want to say I heard, like, what or why did you do this to me? And then I heard the door open and someone crawling out the door and the door pull shut. And then I hear more storming around the house. Bathroom door slamming and my wife calling 911 and saying my father-in-law just tried to kill me, tried to strangle me. And that's all I know.
I did not see my father ever again or hear anything about him again or anyone in my family ever again.
So the voice that said, why did you do this? Do you remember whose voice it was?
Yeah.
This feels like a plot of a thriller. Man trapped in his body overhears a crime and must piece together what happened. Only this isn't a Stephen King novel. This is Jake's reality. He just overheard an assault and attempted murder by the sounds of it. But who pushed who? All Jake can do is lay there and wait for the next clue. Thank you for listening to Blink.
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