Close to home

By David Haldane .

WE first became concerned when she told us that she was in pain.

I’m talking about my Filipino wife’s youngest sister, Kiking, who works as a certified nursing assistant in Southern California. Recently she helped an elderly patient who couldn’t stop coughing. When the patient’s condition worsened, the old woman was admitted to a hospital. And, sure enough, a few days later she tested positive for Covid-19.

That’s when my sister-in-law started feeling those horrible body aches.

I was reminded of all this a few days ago after reading a New York Times piece on the prevalence of what the paper called “an unsung force in American healthcare,” namely Filipino nurses, doctors, therapists, and phlebotomists. The phenomenon is especially evident in my home state of California where, it turns out, fully 20% of the registered nurses are Filipino, most of them working in intensive care.

There are lots of reasons that such an extraordinary number of health workers have emigrated from the Philippines to the USA. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1898 when America first colonized these islands and set up an education system to teach English and, yes, train a new generation of nurses. With the critical nursing shortage during World War II, thousands of Filipino healthcare workers were imported to fill the gap. And, indeed, the trend has continued; Filipinos stepped up during the AIDS epidemic, and many work on the front lines today.

Anyone who’s ever been to California has probably noticed the large numbers of Filipinos on the staff of most hospitals. Growing up there, long before I had any thoughts of marrying a Filipina or relocating to the Philippines, the country’s strong national healthcare presence seemed fairly obvious. In my father’s final years, as he lay ailing with Alzheimer’s, it was a Filipino aide that we hired to take care. And, in choosing a personal physician years later, gravitating towards a Filipino doctor seemed like the natural thing to do.

Now that I’m part of a Filipino family, of course, the association has taken on added significance. My own wife is licensed as a clinical laboratory scientist in California, where she spent several years working in medical labs. Her mother, a licensed midwife from Siargao Island, now works in the kitchen of a healthcare facility in Minnesota. And her first cousin – as well as a number of close Filipino friends – currently work in the U.S. health industry as does her sister.

And what of that young woman with the unrelenting body aches potentially caused by the virus that kills? The first thing she did was get tested to confirm that those bastardly microbes were, indeed, the cause. The results came back positive. Then she quarantined herself for 14 days, completely isolated from family and friends.

Kiking was lucky; after a while, it all went away. Not everyone, however, is so fortunate; sources told the New York Times that, while it’s impossible to say how many Filipino health workers in America have gotten sick, at least 30 – mostly in the New York/New Jersey area – have died, as well as several members of their families.

And in a tragic incident last month, a Filipino nurse succumbed heroically after rushing in without proper protective gear to save a Covid patient who’d suddenly stopped breathing at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles. Celia Lardizabal Marcos, 61, didn’t have time to grab what she needed to protect her own health. Three days later she started feeling sick, and a week after that suffered a painful death at the same hospital where she’d worked for 16 years.

My hat goes off to Marcos and her family, as well as all the others who have gotten sick and/or died. I also salute their colleagues who continue risking their lives every day to preserve our good health.

Mostly, though, my warm wishes and gushiest feelings go out to the colleague I know best; my own close relative by marriage now back at work in California. Things are a little different for Kiking these days, to be sure; she works in full anti-coronavirus body armor and, when her shift ends, goes home to a hotel.

Hopefully, that won’t last long. In the meantime, dear sister, we’re glad that you’re still with us on that frothing front line. Know that you make us proud. And if there’s ever anything we can do to render your life even a little bit easier, well, please just give us a call.

(David Haldane is the author of an award-winning memoir called “Nazis & Nudists.” A former Los Angeles Times staff writer, he is an American journalist, essayist, and broadcaster whose radio work was awarded a 2018 Golden Mike by the Radio & Television News Association of Southern California. He currently lives in Mindanao with his Filipino wife and their two children. This column tells the unfolding story of that adventure. http:///www.davidshaldane.com)