WHEATFILED, NY (WKBW) — “We feel like we got robbed. We feel like we did every right and we still lost our daughter,” cried Lori Salvatore.
Three weeks ago a 22-year-old Wheatfield woman lost her life from complications due to COVID-19.
The mother of Tatiana Moore wants her daughter to be a reminder to people that COVID is real.
“Just be cautions. You know — you don’t want this to happen to you,” Salvatore remarked.
Raw emotion from a mother who stayed by her daughter's side during a difficult battle against COVID.
At just 22, Tatiana Moore had her entire life ahead of her. She worked as the director of a YWCA before and after school program at Edison Elementary in the Town of Tonanwada.
Salvatore said her daughter was "kind and good natured” — a “peacemaker.”
But everything changed so quickly in April, when Moore was diagnosed with COVID-19.
“She had no voice. She was on a ventilator. She was on a tracheotomy. She had no voice and I had to be that voice,” declared Salvatore.
Salvatore transferred her daughter from Mercy Hospital in south Buffalo to the Cleveland Clinic to be on a waiting list for a double lung transplant.
She said her daughter had what she described as a mild case of asthma since she was a child. She said it was COVID that ravaged Tatiana's lungs.
“Once COVID got into her system — it brought on bilateral pneumonia, double pneumonia in both lungs and that with the asthma and the COVID — it just totally destroyed the structure of her lungs. We didn't need an inhaler or anything — until those two things happened,” remarked Salvatore.
But Salvatore says her daughter's body couldn't hold out. She died in Cleveland on July 8th.
Now the brave mother has a warning for younger generations about the danger of COVID.
“She's going to be a learning experience for everybody who doesn't want to wear a mask or just thinks this is a hoax,” Salvatore stated.
No hoax for a mother who watched her daughter's last moments on earth.
“I stayed there until the very end and there's something so — significant about having your child take their first breathe and watching them take their last,” Salvatore reflected.
Moore was the 94th person to die from the virus in Niagara County. The health department can not comment on cases, but noted that a 22-year-old female, who died of COVID earlier this month, was the youngest death due to COVID in the county.
