Column One
Tender Care and a Painful Goodbye to Kim Pham
Doctors and nurses at St. Joseph Hospital all wanted to tend to the broken yet beautiful 23-year-old. Then they became part of an unforgettable farewell.
By Anh Do
March 24, 2014
Just after midnight, paramedics rolled a stretcher with a heavily bruised woman into the emergency room at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. Aside from a credit card, she had no belongings. The only person accompanying her was a Santa Ana police detective.
She looked so young, so alone.
By the time Shannon Semler had finished the paperwork and admitted Kim Pham to the ICU on that January day, it was past 7 a.m. Questions darted through the nurse's mind. The patient was slight and even with severe injuries to her head strikingly pretty. Something very violent had happened.
"I knew by looking at her that she had been attacked," Semler said. "But we're not a trauma center what is she doing here?"
(snip)
Semler tried to focus on the young woman lying on the pale white sheets as physicians conducted tests to determine the level of Pham's brain activity. After a while, a neurosurgeon pulled some of the nurses aside and spoke to them in confidence.
She was brain-dead.
(snip)
By the next day, Jan. 19, at 12:36 p.m., Pham was pronounced dead.
And for the next three days, she remained on life support while her family waited for her older brother to fly in from Puerto Rico. He wanted to say goodbye.
(snip)
Pham's father had no idea that his youngest daughter had long ago registered as an organ donor. It went against the beliefs he'd been raised with in Vietnam. But during the long hours at St. Joseph, he had time to become reconciled with her choice.
Before the nurses wheeled Pham out of ICU, Semler cleaned her body and then stood back as one of the woman's friends combed and braided her hair, then crowned her head with a flower wreath.
Friends, family members, nurses and staffers stood in line as workers wheeled her bed down the hallway, clattering on the tiles.
Dung Pham, the father of Kim Pham. He could only watch as his daughter's gurney disappeared down the corridor.
"It was one of the most amazing events I have ever witnessed," recalled Linda Winston, an in-house counselor to the staff at St. Joseph. "The halls were lined with those who loved her, and the silence was loud with respect for this little body.
(snip)
Pham's father could only watch as his daughter disappeared down the corridor.
"I saw his expression shattered," Bogert said. "He thought he wouldn't have a chance to say goodbye."
Bogert opened the doors and walked Dung Pham to the gurney, a final moment between father and daughter.
And then she was gone.
(MUCH more @ link)
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-ff-kim-pham-hospital-20140324-dto,0,377214.htmlstory#axzz2xYNgkD1A
Kim Pham's legacy continues to be revealed, and this incredibly poignant piece by Anh Do of the LA Times captures how Kim, her family, and friends, truly touched the staff at the hospital, where she spent her last days. Further, she truly lives on, in the lives she has saved in her selfless choice to be an organ and tissue donor.
I am in tears, knowing that regardless of the negativity of the trial that remains for the Pham Family, nothing will ever take away the positive aspect of this choice Kim made. Kim was taken, extinguished brutally, senselessly, and that I will never understand. Reading this story in its entirety helps to alleviate some of that, and I send my heartfelt prayers to her family for the journey that lies ahead.
#JusticeForKimPham
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