In 1977, Amanda Scarpinati was a baby with terrible burns. She was dressed in bandages from head to toe and being held by a caring young nurse.
She and that nurse were together again on Tuesday.
38-year-old pictures of the two together after the then-infant Scarpinati, who was only 3 months old at the time, rolled off a couch onto a hot-steam humidifier and got severe burns, led to the reunion.
One of the photographs was first published on the cover of the Albany Medical annual report in 1977. This was an internal publication for the hospital in upstate New York. Scarpinati gave it new life last week when she uploaded that and three other photographs related to it on Facebook, hoping it would help her find that nurse again.
It works. The pictures spread quickly, and on Tuesday, Scarpinati cried as he hugged Susan Berger, the nurse in the recovery area who was in the pictures.
“I felt like something was missing because I didn’t know who the nurse was,” Scarpinati wrote to CNN on Tuesday night.
“Meeting her today, we clicked right away, and I melted in her arms again. This is a friendship that will last a lifetime.”
Source: abcnews.go.com
Berger, who is now the executive vice president of Cazenovia College in Cazenovia, New York, told reporters that the event is “a great reminder at the end of my career to think back on all the interactions I’ve had with patients and all the things I’ve done.”
“Maybe put aside the hard work and the times it was so stressful and think about this. “This is the best part,” she said.
Pictures and the feeling that someone cared “stayed with me.”
Because of her burns, Scarpinati had to have surgery and was bullied for years. She told CNN station WSTM that the pictures of the nurse helped her get through some of the hardest times in her childhood. They reminded her that someone cared.
She told CNN on Tuesday, “Having a hard childhood and being picked on because of my burns, I found comfort in the beautiful amazing photos of this beautiful stranger, this nurse, holding me.” “And you could tell how much she cared about me.”
Angela Leary, another nurse who used to work at Albany Medical, knew the picture and told Scarpinati the nurse’s identity. Leary wrote back to Scarpinati and said that Berger was “as sweet and caring as she looks in this picture.”
Berger also kept the pictures and remembers Scarpinati and the day the picture was taken.
“I held her in my arms, and I remember that she sort of melted like butter. If she could have said anything to me, it would have been, ‘OK, I’m going to be OK,'” she told WSTM.
Source: www.wtkr.com
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