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I see you.

In your soft, broken English, I do not hear weakness. In your five-foot frame and small features, I see only strength. I do not know you, but I know you are a survivor a man who has fought for his family his entire life. Im so fortunate to meet a man like you, so grateful to be your doctor.

***

Everyone in the room was watching his breathing, the way he gasped for air pulling in his abdomen and stretching out his neck, using all of his energy to fight against time with lungs that were rapidly failing. His wife was admitted upstairs, on a ventilator, fighting just the same. COVID-19 is smoldering through the Hmong community in St. Paul.

Everyone was watching his breathing, but I saw his feet. Feet that first touched the earth on a misty mountainside in Laos. Feet that ran through the jungle beside his brothers helping Americans fight our secret war on communism. Strong feet that carried the load of his family, their suffering and shared tragedy, across the Mekong River, leaving behind a country that would never welcome him back. Feet that worked in a Thai refugee camp stuffed into slippers made from old car tires. Feet that ultimately found a place to call home in the same city where I grew up, shuffling along snow-covered sidewalks in shoes from Savers that were two sizes too big.

This man survived for his family. Fighting his whole life: in Laos against communist forces that sought to kill him and his people, in Thailand waiting in the purgatory of a refugee camp for a chance at a new start, and here in Minnesota struggling to acclimate to a culture and a climate he could never have imagined.

In 1976, while this man and his relatives were hiding in the jungles and caves of western Laos being hunted and killed en masse after they were abandoned by American forces that had used them like pawns to fight a secret war on communism, Richard Dawkins, an English evolutionary biologist, released his seminal work, The Selfish Gene. This book describes how human emotions and behaviors like sexual desire, love of family, and instinct to protect our young have direct underpinnings in our DNA. Our desire to see our children thrive is hard-wired into our genetic material to give our genes a selective advantage to continue on generation to generation. The problem is that our genes are not alone in this world, they are constantly at odds with the DNA of others: not just other humans, but a dearth of microscopic organisms (including the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV2) living on and around us taking what they need from us to ensure that their genetic material survives on to the next generation.

***

In Laos, you were used by the American government to do our bidding in a war that wasnt yours. You and your family suffered the immense cost of genocide, surviving only to become a stateless people. Here, in Minnesota, you were pushed to the margins of our society, forced to live in an impoverished part of town and take on the jobs white Americans did not want. And now, as you lay here before me, infected with a virus that found you here, but has still not made it to your home village in the lush hills of Laos, again you suffer to survive.

I spoke to your daughter just now. I could hear your grandchildren playing in the background as she gently sobbed, telling me to keep you alive for them. Your genes live on through your family, but sadly your body will not.

Know that I see you. Know that Im proud to call you my neighbor. Know that I will tell my son your story.

Im sorry I cant do more to save your life.

Dr. Daniel Hogan, Lake Elmo, is a resident physician at Regions Hospital.

See more here:
Dr. Daniel Hogan: To the Hmong man I met last night in the emergency room - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press