A woman hailing from New York and born during the Spanish flu pandemic has endured COVID-19.
Angelina Friedman, who resides in a Lake Mohegan nursing home, was admitted to a hospital on 21 March for a minor medical operation. But after she tested positive for COVID-19, her treatment was delayed.
Whereas her family praises her as something of a ‘superhuman’ for her extraordinary lifespan in which she has endured Spanish flu, miscarriages, chemotherapy, sepsis, and now COVID-19, her second pandemic.
Angelina has lived longer than her husband and 10 siblings as most of the persons in their family lived till the age of 95 except his brother.
“My mother is a survivor,” Friedman’s daughter Joanne Merola said. “She has DNA which makes her super-human.”
Merola further told that, ‘Friedman’s mother died on the ship which was coming from Italy to the US, while giving birth to her.
Her two elder sisters were also on board, and both of them took care of her.’
She was brought up in Brooklyn, where she and her sisters reunited with their father after her mother’s death.
Later she married Harold Friedman and both were diagnosed with cancer.
‘She and my father both had cancer. She survived. He didn’t,’ Merola added.
Friedman is now the last of her remaining siblings and strives to be healthy.
She currently resides in Lake Mohegan, New York, at the North Westchester Restorative Treatment and Nursing Center where she was diagnosed with coronavirus after she was admitted for minor surgery.
She finally tested negative for the virus on April 20th after spending a week in the hospital and is still in isolation.
Merola claims her mother was suffering from fevers on and off but never had respiratory problems.
Since February, Merola has been unable to see her mum and claims Friedman is almost deaf and they are unable to speak on the phone.
Nurses used to tell Merola that after defeating the virus, Friedman’s doing amazingly well.
‘They are showing me that she is doing well. She is up, doing as much as possible about it. She looks for wool so that she can knit. If my mother could see this, I’d say, “You’re forging ahead, Ma. You’re going to outlive us,” said Merola.