LYNN — Jenea Blackman Azaryoun was born with congenital heart disease and had open-heart surgery before her first birthday; next month, she will run the Boston Marathon.
The Malden resident, who works as a paraprofessional at Pickering Middle School, is participating to raise money for Boston Children’s Hospital, where she has been a patient nearly her entire life.
“I’ve always been grateful, but now I feel like ‘thank you’ is not enough,” Azaryoun said.
Azaryoun grew up without needing medication or restrictions after her first surgery, but at age 20 she had surgery to put a new valve in her heart. Soon after, she had to have another surgery when her team realized that it wasn’t working properly.
Over the next few years, she met her husband and had her first child. Then, in early 2020, around the same time that she found out that she was pregnant with her second baby, she started feeling out of breath and tired often.
“I couldn’t move from my bed to my couch without sounding like I walked up a flight of stairs,” Azaryoun said.
It was determined that she needed yet another surgery to fix the valve in her heart. In June 2020, while 20 weeks pregnant, she went through yet another operation.
“It was the first time I felt actually helpless and very vulnerable and scared,” she said. “I needed an ultrasound before the procedure to make sure the baby was OK and then immediately after to make sure the baby was still OK. To me it felt like hours … waiting for that heartbeat.”
Azaryoun and her son made it through the procedure, and this year, she will run the marathon to thank the hospital for their help.
She got into running around seven years ago, and has done a few half-marathons with friends before for various causes. In 2017, she ran the New Jersey Marathon without training beforehand, and called it “the worst experience of (her) life.”
“I literally was in the hotel room with my husband, licking saltine crackers, saying I’m never doing this again,” she said.
She stopped running for a while, but recently, with two kids, getting back into it has given her a time for peace and quiet. Along with other members of the Boston Children’s marathon team, she trains on Saturday mornings, building up to the 26.2-mile race.
“We’re running at a conversation pace, so I’m just talking. It feels like I’m just out with friends and I forget that I’m running,” Azaryoun said. “I feel like 2020 for a lot of people was the worst time in (their) life, and the worst time for me was hearing that I need this surgery and there was a 30 percent chance that my son wouldn’t make it. So I felt like taking the worst feelings all together and saying, ‘let me try this again.'”
Through the hospital’s Miles for Miracles program, Azaryoun was paired with Aviana, a 3-year-old girl from Revere ― the same age as Azaryoun’s own daughter ― with a similar heart condition to her own and. Aviana, too, had open-heart surgery as an infant, just 10 days old, and now uses a pacemaker.
“When I hear ‘pacemaker,’ I think of someone elderly. I don’t think of a little 3-year-old who should be starting preschool and playing with bubbles and soccer,” she said.
Azaryoun hopes to raise $10,000 for the hospital before the race on Oct. 11.
“It’s the perfect timing to put my body to the test that they helped fix,” she said. “If other families and kids can continue to receive the care they give, that would make me feel a little more comfortable saying thank you.”
