In December 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Ellen announced that she had contracted COVID despite taking every precaution possible. She quarantined, followed medical advice, and expected to feel miserable for a while, just like everyone else who’d gone through it. But what she didn’t expect was that her back would feel like it was being “pulled apart from the inside.”

“What they don’t tell you,” she later explained, “is that you’ll have severe back pain. I had no idea that was a symptom until I talked to a few other people who went through the same thing.”

At first, she thought it might be something else—a pulled muscle, maybe stress. But the pain only grew worse, radiating across her shoulders and lower spine, leaving her