Coronavirus has killed hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe, but it met its match in the form of one feisty 105 year-old great grandmother from northern New Jersey.
Fox News reported that Marie Ferise is preparing to celebrate her 106th birthday after beating COVID-19 just three weeks after she was diagnosed. Ferise, a cancer survivor who lives at Homestead Health Care and Rehabilitation Center, did not even know that she had coronavirus until she tested positive for it. As soon as she tested positive for the deadly virus, staffers at the facility feared the worst.
“I was nervous,” Lori Donkersloot, a nurse at the center, told Fox 13. “She is the eldest resident we have here. We all were quite worried about her.”
Two of Ferise’s five grandchildren said that they were very nervous as well.
“I was very upset,” said her grandson Alan Clark. “Did a lot of praying, every day, every night. Hoping she would pull through. I knew she was a strong woman.”
Ferise, who was born when Woodrow Wilson was president, was not about to let COVID-19 take her down. She managed to beat the virus in no time, and she’s now excited to celebrate her birthday on June 3 via FaceTime with her family, since they aren’t allowed to visit. She has even been joking with nurses that her birthday wish is to take off her mask to celebrate!
Ferise even has memories of the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic, which claimed the life of her grandfather.
“There was so much death, you couldn’t even bury someone on time,” she told NJHerald.com before her 104th birthday. “People were piled high in the cemetery.”
Ferise was born six weeks before World War I began, and she spent years owning and operating a hotel with her husband, who she married in 1935. He tragically died in 1993, and she has been a widow ever since. She beat cancer ten years ago, and she can now add coronavirus to the list of things that failed to take her down!
Find out more about this incredible woman’s story in the video below.
This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.
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