Jessica Denny walks confidently into the main entrance of Madonna’s Omaha Campus and immediately feels at home. She takes comfort in familiar surroundings and catches up with Outpatient Therapy employees who’ve become friends since her days spent recovering here.
“This place is hallowed ground,” Jessica Denny, a stroke survivor, said. “I’m sitting in the Omaha Campus. It’s beautiful here. These are my people. This is my place. There’s nowhere else like it.”

In December 2017, Jessica survived a stroke at just 33 years old. She says the stroke affected the entire left side of her body. “Lost speech. Lost words. Lost thoughts. Lost body,” she said.
The wife and mother of young children including a 10-month-old girl, Jessica says the diagnosis was devastating. “I’m starting from zero,” she recalled. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do. I’ve lost so much mobility, so much of my identity is tied to how I move through the world. And now that’s lost.”
Jessica says she found a glimmer of hope while recovering at Nebraska Medicine when a Madonna nurse liaison came in and introduced her to the concept of a rehabilitation hospital and what stroke recovery would look like. She immediately agreed saying, “I had no idea what I was getting into and the blessings that this place would give me.”
Struggling with her speech and unsteady on her feet, Jessica says Madonna was life-changing thanks to a customized program, specialized technology, motivating staff and opportunities to prepare for life back home.
“My daughter was one of the first babies in the simulated crib and area,” she said. “I was able to lay her in a crib and scoop her out and do all these things in my new body. Madonna made that effortless. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to go home with the confidence I had to continue being a mother.”
Jessica returned home and went back to work. She continued making gains in Outpatient Therapy and slowly resumed her passion for running. “I had a running stroller that I purchased before the stroke,” she said. “It was almost like a walker. So I would put Kaylor in there and it had its own brake and stuff. I started walking. I could not run at all. My leg would buckle and it was pretty devastating for me. A lot of tears. A lot of laughs.”
She says gearing up for half-marathons and fun runs, including the Madonna Foundation’s Miles for Madonna 5k, has helped her persevere through the highs and lows of her recovery.
“Madonna is here every day churning out these miracles where, they’re taking people like me that are just devastated, utterly and completely, just physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally, and putting us back together.”
She added, “I’m a better person than I was before. They made it okay to be my old self. But to be a new version. A newer, better version of myself than I was before.”
Seven years later, Jessica continues to live life to the fullest with her family. She pays it forward whenever possible by serving as a peer volunteer and being a Madonna Foundation Board member.
“To be able to forward that, to give other people hope, sign me up,” Jessica said. “Tell me where to be. Tell me where to go. I’m going to go there and do it.”