“Well it is here,” Salle Horning said in a Facebook post on March 31, referring to the COVID-19 coronavirus and the nursing home of which she was a resident.
“It was in the back of my mind, when they first called me and told me that they had somebody (who was COVID positive) there in the nursing home,” Richard Horning said of the prospect of his mother contracting the virus.
She did, dying of complications of the virus on April 14 at UPMC Jameson in New Castle, at age 57, according to her family.
Although the Masury woman had had health issues for some time – she had been in and out of hospitals and nursing homes since Thanksgiving – the speed of her decline was surprising to her family. Horning was at home on Saturday, April 11, under 24-hour care, when she talked to Richard and told him of the soup she was planning to make the next day.
“She said they were cutting up celery in the kitchen and everything else like that,” Richard said of his mom and the caregiver. “She was doing fine. It just came Saturday night where they said her oxygen levels weren’t staying up. That’s why they decided to take her to the hospital.”
Horning didn’t have a fever, and the cough she had told her son about the week before didn’t seem to be significant enough to warrant concern, Richard said.
“Her oxygen was low was really the only sign she was really having,” he said.
Horning was a patient at O’Brien Memorial Health Care Center, Masury, when she was notified that someone at the nursing home had tested positive for the coronavirus, said Richard, whose dad, Chris, died on Valentine’s Day in 2019.
“When they contacted me, they said one person was here with the virus, but they were no longer here,” he said. “It was an employee, but we don’t think they had contact with your mother. Another one was a couple days later, but it was a patient that was on the other side of the unit. At that point in time, we really didn’t think there was any contact with her. I guess we really didn’t think of it that way. I did know that in these nursing homes that they are spreading quickly, but, by the way they were kind of explaining it, it just didn’t sound like it would spread over to her way. I didn’t get that feeling that that would happen.”
Richard said he was “naive” about the virus when it started generating news coverage.
“I didn’t think when it first started, when they first talked about that cruise line that got it out there back at the beginning of the year, that it was gonna come across here and sweep the nation like it has,” he said. “It’s hit close to home now, and it’s kind of frightening to think what it can do and how it can tear families apart. It is something frightening. Hopefully, it goes down. Hopefully, we can find vaccines and cures. Hopefully, it just becomes a one-time thing that we look back on and say, OK, let’s move forward. It’s not a good situation right now.”
Richard said he will always remember his mother as “a very loving, caring person. She loved being with family and friends. That was pretty much her whole life, anything she could do to try to be with family and friends.”
Richard said his favorite moments with his mom were holidays; family vacations, particularly their annual jaunts to Cedar Point; how she treated neighborhood kids like they were her own; and how she embraced his activities, whether it was sports or school.
“I remember hitting my first home run over center field at Brookfield park, and she ran out there, picked up my ball and started jumping up and down, when I was in Little League,” he said. “She was proud.”
When Horning’s mother developed Alzheimer’s disease, she cared for her. When her mother-in-law took ill, she took her in and tended to her needs.
“From working in doctors’ offices, she knew a lot of people,” Richard said. “She was always reaching out, willing to help. Anywhere I ever went, they always knew my mom. ‘Are you Salle’s son? Yeah, I’m Salle’s son.’ A lot of the people I know is because of her.”
For as focused on her family and friends as Horning was, her funeral will be a small, immediate-family-only affair, something that Richard called “saddening.”
“She was close with everybody, no matter if it was her side, my dad’s side,” Richard said. “My dad’s sisters and brother, they call me and tell how terrible a situation this is that they can’t come up and be here with the family. It is kind of saddening that we can’t all get together at this time, kind of see her one last time. I did assure them that hopefully, when all this settles down, in the summertime, we’ll have some sort of get-together and memorial for her, just have all the family together just for her.”
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