Tender care and a painful goodbye to Kim Pham

By Anh Do, Los Angeles Times

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.

Nga Doan, right, of Fountain Valley and her 21-month-old son, Frederik Doan, say goodbye to their niece and cousin, Kim Pham, 23, at a memorial outside The Crosby nightclub in downtown Santa Ana. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“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?”

Although St. Joseph was no stranger to the critically ill and dying, most patients were older and arrived with detailed medical histories. Those with traumatic injuries were generally routed to UCI Medical Center in Orange or over to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana.

But it was a busy night, leading Pham to land at St. Joseph.

It would be hours before the story of the brawl outside a downtown Santa Ana nightclub would be picked up by the media. Even when details came spilling out, though, hospital staff tried to ignore what was going on outside.

“No one knew why she was here and that was fine,” said Soudi Bogert, a veteran ICU nurse. “We had our job to do.”

But it was more than a job with Pham. Over the days to come, nurses not assigned to her would check in on her, hugging one another in the hallways for support. A security guard prepared spreadsheets of all the visitors who made the somber pilgrimage to St. Joseph. Administrators put aside their visiting-hour rules, letting family members and friends stay days at a time.

They all wanted to take care of this broken 23-year-old who never opened her eyes or uttered a word. And they became part of a goodbye none of them will forget.

Read the full article by Anh Do from Los Angeles Times.