Mary Rosaker McDonald has had a heckuva time retiring.
She first tried after 23 years as a nurse at the Topeka Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
“I couldn’t handle retirement,” she said. “I lasted six months.”
From there she found a job at a nursing home facility, where she worked another four years.
“I loved the residents,” she said. “Geriatrics has always been my specialty.”
It was when she got COVID-19 in December 2020, before a vaccine was available, that McDonald’s health and subsequent perspective on life began to change.
A victim of long Covid, McDonald, age 69, said recovery — both physical and mental — has been slow going.
That’s not to say she’s not trying.
McDonald and her husband, Steve, both graduated from Iola High School, he in 1967, she in 1971.
They married in 1972, a year after Steve returned from serving with the Navy in Vietnam.
For almost all of their marriage they have lived predominantly in Emporia and Topeka where she has worked as a registered nurse. Steve’s career was selling cars for the Ed Bozarth and Laird Noller dealerships in Topeka before he was declared disabled from his service in Vietnam.
They have three children, Joy, age 48, Donnie, 46, and Wendy, 44.
Since age 2, Donnie has lived in state-run facilities designed to care for the mentally and physically impairred.
McDonald earned her LPN license from Emporia’s Flint Hills Technical College and her RN degree from Neosho Community College’s program in Ottawa.
McDonald suspects it’s her career as a nurse that prompted her daughter, Wendy Froggatte, a nurse with the Humboldt school district, to contact the Register, saying, “my mother has a wonderful story to share should you daughter’s comment.
“She’s the reason I’m feeling good.”
