Asian Frontline Medics in US Face Hate Amid COVID-19

He admitted another patient with symptoms to the hospital, where he was up and walking around after a few hours. The next day, the man couldn’t walk and after administering I.V. steroids,? an I.V. infusion, and plasma transfusions “we couldn’t help him at all.”

Four days after the initial diagnosis, the patient became Vo’s first to die of COVID-19.

Vo didn't know what to say to the family,?but they were “nice enough to call me and inform me, ‘Doctor Vo, you tried your best. Don't worry. Don't be sad.’ … They even encouraged me to continue to help other people.”

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“I've been a nurse for more than 30 years, I've been through the death and the birth, but this is an unbelievable for me… I did not follow the numbers because it's so discouraging,” said Anchalee Dulayathitikul, 55, an intermediate care nurse.

She arrived in the U.S. in 2014, after deciding she wanted an American education for her children.

She had opted for a nursing career because her grandfather thought she had a caring nature. Dulayathitikul earned her degree in nursing and midwifery in 1988 from Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

More than a quarter century later, she passed all the tests in the battery needed for nursing certification in Maryland on her first sitting.

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She works at the University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Medical Center and after a year, she told VOA Thai, “I see the flow and I see? how we? can ?take care of (COVID-19 patients) successfully.”

Dulayathitikul plans visit her unwell mother in Thailand once the pandemic, and its travel restrictions retreat. She will return to Maryland for her children and her career “because I love my career a lot.”

Darunee Rasameloungon, 41, a Bangkok native who arrived in the U.S. in 1991 with her family to join her father who had emigrated ahead of them. She wanted to be an engineer or an FBI agent until she helped care for a cousin after a bus hit him, breaking his arms and legs.

Darunee (Jackie) Rasamelougon is a nurse technician at Reston Hospital Center in Virginia. (Courtesy Darunee (Jackie) Rasamelougon)

When she decided to pursue nursing, her father told her he couldn’t pay for college on what he earned delivering pizza.

Working with her high school counselor, Rasameloungon parlayed high grades, volunteer work and school activities into scholarships to pay for all four years at George Mason University’s nursing school in Fairfax, Virginia.

She graduated in 2001 and is now a progressive care unit nurse technician at Fairfax Hospital, where she has worked since 2008.

“It's always hard, this is very sad when you have to wrap someone in the bag, you know, … they died by themselves,” she told VOA Thai.

“They have nobody with  them, and their family cannot be with them, (it) is really sad …to die by yourself. It is really overwhelming. My God, you feel sorry for them. And it's just, like a reality hit: This . . . can happen to anybody.”

Although Rasameloungon intends to continue nursing in the U.S. in part to remain close to her son, she wants to take a long break in Thailand when the pandemic subsides because “the COVID (made) me realize that I want to spend more time with my family.”

Born in Menifee, California, Limyi Heng, 38, is the child of Cambodian refugees. He spent three years in the Air Force, most of the time in Southern California. “But I did a lot of tours all around the United States, which gave me a deep appreciation for the diversity of America.”

His Air Force mentor guided him into a career as a nurse practitioner, and he earned his master’s degree in nursing from Columbia University, where he developed a network that informed him early about the spread of COVID-19 in New York City and elsewhere.

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He works at Redlands Community Hospital and San Gorgonio Memorial Hospital.

The surge of COVID-19 cases began in October and continued through December. “There wasn't really a worst moment. I think it was this really, the long hours, the long hours,” Heng told VOA Cambodian.

For him, the upside at work is “being part of a team” that includes hospital housekeepers, the logistics people who deliver protective gear and community leaders who provide “the right messaging, the right information” to “drown out the misinformation.”

For Conners, similar teamwork 2,600 is what leads to his proudest moments of the pandemic, when patients “leave the ICU. This kind of a big accomplishment (is) from the teamwork that we have done.”