Retired, Unemployed MA Firefighters, EMTs Help Fight COVID

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Stephen Carrabino lost his mom to the coronavirus. Now he's helping put an end to the pandemic.

"She wouldn't have died had it not been for COVID," Carrabino said. "So I thought, you know what, I'm a nurse, I kept my license, I'm just going to go back to be part of the solution."

Carrabino, a former Somerville deputy police chief, is now one of the thousands of people working to vaccinate millions of Bay State residents against the virus that took the life of his mother and more than 16,000 others in Massachusetts.

He thinks about his mom, Theresa Carrabino, who died last June at age 95, as he preps and injects. But Carrabino is just as focused on the people in front of him — the nervous, the excited, the teary-eyed — who he's helping give a new lease on life after a year of isolation and loss.

"It's the best, really," he said. "It's like being around kids when they open Christmas presents, every day."

Carrabino, 63, returned to the front lines a week after retiring from his 25-year career at the Somerville Police Department.

Behind the masks and face shields are many more just like him — retired or out-of-work police officers, firefighters, nurses and emergency medical technicians who all answered the call for one more heroic act, and regained a sense of purpose in the process.

"Even though it's a small piece of the puzzle, it's a piece," pediatric nurse practitioner Sally McGowan said. "We all really have to do our share."

McGowan lost both of her parents in the past two years, her mother more recently amid the public health crisis. Though neither died from COVID-19, the pandemic and the "difficult" restrictions that kept McGowan from seeing her mom near the end compounded her grief.

"After she passed away I just kind of needed a purpose, and I felt like there was a huge need to get people vaccinated and kind of just keep going," the 59-year-old Cohasset resident said.

McGowan heard on the news that Cataldo Ambulance Service was hiring vaccinators for the sites it staffs in conjunction with Cambridge startup CIC Health. By the end of February she was preparing and administered vaccines at Fenway Park, and is now getting shots into arms at the new mass vaccination site at the Hynes Convention Center.

"I vaccinated a man, 101 years old, and he just — his strength, his resilience was pretty incredible," McGowan said. "I feel everyone that I've vaccinated has some kind of story to tell. Some people are excited, others are anxious, and they've all had different losses in the last year. But I think there's hope — this hopefulness — in all of them."

Already involved in coordinating COVID-19 testing in the Boston area, Cataldo Ambulance Service pivoted to vaccinations in the new year, launching its "Stick it to COVID" campaign and hiring hundreds of people to staff the Fenway Park and Hynes vaccination sites.

"The response was unbelievable," Cataldo Vice President Dan Hoffenberg said, adding that the ambulance service received some 4,000 resumes and has hired 1,100 people thus far to support vaccination efforts.

Among them was Joe Desiato, a 64-year-old retired pediatrician from Bedford who said he'd "felt fairly helpless during this COVID crisis" until Cataldo gave him the opportunity to vaccinate.

"For all of the people whose mission was to try to help people and try to better their health and their communities' health, this has been a win-win situation," Desiato said. "We're all thrilled to help."

Ed Hassan went from being "in charge of a lot of people" as a shift commander for Boston Emergency Medical Services to being a cog in the machine of mass vaccination sites — but that's just fine with him.

"That's the thing for me — just being part of something and being counted on and knowing you're actually doing something important," the 55-year-old said. "This is probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing to be a part of."

Hassan retired from Boston EMS in October after 33 years of service, the last few months of which saw him and his staff suiting up in full personal protective equipment and shipping out to answer call after call for patients with COVID-like symptoms and, sometimes, the lethal virus itself.

"It was stressful," Hassan said.

But the Peabody resident didn't think twice when he answered the call from a friend at Cataldo to help vaccinate.

"I spent my whole life doing something important. Once you don't have something to do that's important, you feel kind of empty," Hassan said. "This gives you a sense of purpose."

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