This isn’t Ida Acconciamessa’s first rodeo.
The 104-year-old Brooklyn resident has lived through the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and both World Wars. Plus, she’s survived Stage 4 melanoma, two broken hips, an infection that affects the colon called Clostridioides difficile, and now, the coronavirus.
“She always used to say, ‘I was born under a lucky star.’ That was her mantra in life,” her daughter Barbara Senese, 77, told CBS News. “And you know what? To be able to get through this virus, those words often come to my mind.”
Senese and Johann Giordano, 75, have visited their mother every day at her residence at the Sheepshead Nursing and Rehabilitation Center until March, when the nursing home stopped letting in visitors. The doting daughters were forced to make their visits through their mother’s first-floor window, gloved and masked up for extra protection against COVID-19.
During a visit on March 26, their normally engaged mother didn’t seem like herself, and on April 4, the women received word that their mother had tested positive for the coronavirus. Acconciamessa’s symptoms began with a very bad cough before going “strictly downhill,” Senese said.
“We really didn’t think she was going to be able to pull through this,” Senese told CBS News. “She wasn’t even able to speak. She was lifeless.”
Although they expected the worst, they knew she was a “fighter” with “an underlying strength to conquer things.”
By April 24, Senese said the nursing home reported that Acconciamessa was doing “much, much better” and by May 1, she became “very chatty” once again.
Marco Perrone, a nurse at the facility where Acconciamessa battled COVID-19, calls her recovery nothing short of a “miracle,” considering the higher fatality rate among older Americans, especially in nursing homes.
The secret to longevity according to this perennial survivor? Stick to red. Senese said her mother was known to down a glass of red wine, plus a red McIntosh apple, every day until the age of 102.
