Please Help Charlie & Mary Ehret

Dear Friends, Family and Coworkers, We are writing this today because a member of our work family is in need of some help but he isn’t a person who asks for it. Charles Ehret is a registered nurse at University Hospital in Newark in our Emergency Department for over 25 years. He has been a frontline worker during this Covid 19 pandemic, plus he has worked during many other challenging medical incidents such as 9/11 and the Ebola crisis. He also works for his own town of Middletown’s Office of Emergency Management. We all just recently learned that his wife of 32 years, Mary, was just diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis commonly known as ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Mary Ehret is a wife, mother of 4 and also a fellow registered nurse. Mary is a woman that has been challenged in her life. She also beat a rare form of Sphenoid Sinus Cancer twice. Unfortunately, over the last 8 months her health has been declining more rapidly. She has been experiencing increasing muscle pain, trouble walking, and has been falling. Some of her falls have ended up in hospitalizations and a stint in rehab during the Covid pandemic. Medications offered some relief but the diagnosis was confirmed after she saw 2 neurologists. Mary Ehret is a strong and hardworking woman. She has been a registered nurse since 1983. In 1993 she started teaching at Brookdale Community College nursing program, and has been the Director of Nursing since 2013. She has taught and mentored thousands of nurses over the course of her career, and played an integral role in expanding the number of nursing graduates entering our workforce. She also has helped raise four successful young adults: Elizabeth, 30, is a public defender in rural Montana; Charles, 27, is a port engineer in military; Rita, 26, is a behavioral technician for children with autism; and Sam, 20, is in college studying physics. Mary is really a woman to admire. Charlie and Mary have selflessly dedicated their lives to help others. They were looking forward to retirement and traveling and now they are being face with a whole new set of challenges and expenses. We all understand what a devastating blow this is to Mary and Charlie’s family and we are looking to help them like they have helped so many countless others. It’s time for us to do for them, coming together as families do in times of crisis. They are in need of modifications within the home to make it more accessible and usable for Mary, and other accessibility equipment to help her leave the home. The family is also soon going to need substantial adaptive technology to help Mary with communication. Anything will help. Thank you for taking the time to read this story and we hope you can help in any way. We will be posting updates on this page of Charlie and Mary.