To the editor:
Dear Mary Manzi,
You are a wonderful nurse and a front-line worker in the battle against a killer virus.
You recently retired after 30 years working at the Lynn Home for Elderly Persons (LHEP). When you started your career in nursing, did you ever think your last working year would be spent battling a vicious killer whose death toll worldwide would be more than 3 million, and whose primary target was elderly persons whom you took care of day to day?
You could have retired a year earlier, but you did not. When things got deadly last spring, you stayed to protect the residents and staff of the LHEP. The Home was your second family. You stayed because of your love and devotion to your family.
You were the nurse in charge, and you were given an enormous task to keep all your residents healthy. You succeeded. While other assisted-living facilities kept track of how many were sick and how many COVID-19 deaths they had, LHEP stayed out of the news and kept one important statistic: Zero deaths from COVID-19. This was an amazing feat.
I can only imagine what you went through over the last year. While I talked to my mother on the phone, I could sense the fear in her voice. She would stop mid-sentence and say, “they’re running all over the place again.”
I would ask who was running. She would say, “I don’t know, they’re covered from head to toe (with personal protective equipment).”
Those people running were you, Mary, and Carrie Baird and the wonderful staff of the Lynn Home.
While lots of people were able to ride out the pandemic from the safety of home, you were face to face with a vicious killer. The Home already had protocols for dealing with situations involving infectious diseases. Those were modified to align with guidelines put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
While COVID-19 had entered the building at different times during the year, the quick response by you and the staff kept the virus at bay. Thorough cleaning and strict adherence to CDC guidelines contained the virus and kept the residents and staff alive. You were tested and you not only passed, you excelled.
Thank you so very much.
Brian Chisholm
Lynn
