Bradenton woman with chronic back pain gets rent help from Season of Sharing

Year after year, the pain crept up on her.

In her youth, Lisa Jakob was an athlete, involved in swimming and gymnastics in school.

Then sometime in her 20s, the back pain began.

“Little by little, I couldn’t walk as much,” she recalled. Nor could she stand for long periods of time.

Into her thirties and forties, it worsened but was bearable. She didn’t let it affect her life or her work.

For 15 years, she held jobs in loss prevention in department stores in Miami, where she’d grown up, and later in Bradenton.

In her free time, she volunteered for pet adoption centers and did dog training.

And then in early 2018, she started a job she loved – in customer service at Whole Foods not far from her Bradenton apartment.

But two years later, the pain was worsening, becoming relentless. Specialists told her she had degenerative disc protrusions in her spine. She was mystified how that could be. She’d never suffered a major injury.

Read the full story in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune