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Acknowledgments

Ib tug pas ua tsis tau ib pluag mov los yog ua tsis tau ib tug laj kab.
One stick cannot cook a meal or build a fence.

I would like to thank some of the people who enabled me to write this book:

Bill Selvidge, who started it all by telling me stories about his Hmong patients, and who became my host, intermediary, teacher, and sounding board.

Robert Gottlieb, who assigned the germinal story. Robert Lescher, my literary agent, who always knew I had a book in me somewhere. Jonathan Galassi and Elisheva Urbas, extraordinary editors who at every stage were able to see both the forest and the trees.

The John S. Knight Fellowship program at Stanford University, which, among many other boons, allowed me to study at Stanford Medical School. The classes I audited deepened both my medical knowledge and my understanding of what it means to be a doctor.

Michele Salcedo, who helped gather written sources during the embryonic phases. Michael Cassell, Nancy Cohen, Jennifer Pitts, and Jennifer Veech, who checked facts with skill and enterprise. Tony Kaye, researcher nonpareil, who tracked down answers to hundreds of questions that had stumped me for years.

The dozens of people, cited under individual chapter headings in my Notes on Sources, who were willing to pass on their knowledge.

The doctors and nurses at Merced Community Medical Center who helped and educated me, with especial thanks to Dan Murphy.

Sukey Waller, who introduced me to Merced’s Hmong leaders. They trusted me because they trusted her.

The Hmong community of Merced, whose members were willing to share their sophisticated culture with me and who earned my passionate respect.

Jeanine Hilt, whose death was a terrible loss.

Raquel Arias, Andrea Baker, John Bethell, Dwight Conquergood, Jim Fadiman, Abby Kagan, Martin Kilgore, Pheng Ly, Susan Mitchell, Chong Moua, Dang Moua, Karla Reganold, Dave Schneider, Steve Smith, Rhonda Walton, Carol Whitmore, Natasha Wimmer, and Mayko Xiong, for help of many kinds.

Bill Abrams, Jon Blackman, Lisa Colt, Sandy Colt, Byron Dobell, Adam Goodheart, Peter Gradjansky, Julie Holding, Kathy Holub, Charlie Monheim, Julie Salamon, Kathy Schuler, and Al Silverman, who read part or all of the manuscript and offered criticism and enthusiasm, both equally useful. Jane Condon, Maud Gleason, and Lou Ann Walker, priceless friends who not only read the book but let me talk about it incessantly for years.

Harry Colt, Elizabeth Engle, and Fred Holley, who meticulously vetted the manuscript for medical accuracy. Annie Jaisser, who clarified many aspects of the Hmong language and corrected my Hmong spelling. Gary Stone, who set me straight on some important details of the wars in Laos and Vietnam. Any errors that remain are my fault, not theirs.

May Ying Xiong Ly, my interpreter, cultural broker, and friend, who built a bridge over waters that would otherwise have been uncrossable.

Blia Yao Moua and Jonas Vangay, two wise and generous men who taught me what it means to be Hmong. Nearly a decade after we first met, they were still answering my questions. Would that everyone could have such teachers.

My brother, Kim Fadiman, who in dozens of late-night telephone calls responded to faxed chapters and weighed nuances of phrasing so minute that only another Fadiman could possibly appreciate them. Kim also read aloud the entire manuscript into a tape recorder so our father, who lost his sight four years ago, could listen to it.

My mother, Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, and my father, Clifton Fadiman, who through love and example taught me most of what I know about good reporting and good writing.

My children, Susannah and Henry, for the joy they have brought.

Monica Gregory, Dianna Guevara, and Brigitta Kohli, who allowed me to write by caring for my children with imagination and tenderness.

There are three debts that are unpayable.

I owe the first to Neil Ernst and Peggy Philp, physicians and human beings of rare quality, who spent hours beyond count helping me understand a case that most doctors might prefer to forget. Their courage and honesty have been an inspiration.

I owe the second to the Lee family, who changed my whole way of looking at the world when they welcomed me into their home, their daily lives, and their rich culture. Nao Kao Lee was a patient and eloquent educator. Foua Yang was a loving guide and at times a surrogate parent. I thank all the Lee children, but especially True, who helped me immeasurably during the final stages of my research and also became my friend. And to Lia, the gravitational center around which this book revolves, I can only say that of the many sadnesses in the world that I wish could be righted, your life is the one I think of most often in the small hours of the night.

I owe the greatest debt to my husband, George Howe Colt, to whom this book is dedicated. In both a metaphorical sense and a literal one, George has been everything to me. Over the years, he has made fact-checking calls, helped me file thousands of particles of research, taken care of our children while I worked, and talked over every twist and turn of character, style, structure, and emphasis. He read every word—except these—at least twice, and his editing was brilliant. When I got discouraged, knowing that George cared about Lia Lee made me believe others would as well. Were it not for him, my book would never have been written, and my life would be unimaginably dimmer.

17

The Eight Questions

Lia did not die, nor did she recover. Foua often dreamed that her daughter could walk and talk, but when she awoke, Lia lay curled next to her in bed, a slight, silent husk who hardly seemed big enough to contain her family’s load of memory, anger, confusion, and grief. She lay suspended in time, growing only a few inches, gaining little weight, always looking far younger than her age, while the Lee siblings who still lived at home—six athletic, bilingual children who moved with ease between the Hmong and the American worlds—grew up around her. Cheng joined the Marine Reserves and was called to serve in the Gulf War, but to Foua’s nearly hysterical relief, the war ended two days before his scheduled flight to Saudi Arabia. May went to Fresno State University, majoring in health science, a choice influenced by her childhood experiences, both positive and negative, as the ad hoc arbitrator between her parents and the medical establishment. Yer, a volleyball star who had won the award for Best Girl Athlete at Merced High School, joined May at Fresno State two years later, majoring in physical education. True became Merced High’s student body treasurer and president of its Youth Culture Club, a Hmong social and service organization with more than 200 members. Mai became a stand-out soccer player and was known as one of the most beautiful teenagers in Merced, a reputation that caused boys to fight over her and girls all too frequently to resent her. Pang grew from a harum-scarum toddler into a self-possessed schoolgirl with a flair for traditional Hmong dance. There were a few tremors as the Lee children passed through adolescence, but never the rifts that American families accept almost as a matter of course. “My parents are the coolest parents in the world,” True once wrote me. “We don’t have everything in the world, but we do have the closeness of us eight sisters, one brother, and our parents. This is the coolest family ever and I would never trade it for anything else in this world.”

Nao Kao gained weight and was troubled by high blood pressure. Foua felt tired much of the time. Seeing that their energies were waning, Jeanine Hilt urged the Lees to let Lia return to the Schelby Center for Special Education each day, not to educate her—that was a thing of the past—but to give her parents a few hours’ respite each day. Because of their persistent fear that Lia might be stolen from them again by the government, the Lees were reluctant at first, but because they trusted Jeanine, they eventually agreed.

Dee Korda, one of whose foster children was severely retarded and also attended Schelby, frequently saw Lia there, lying on her back with her hands strapped to blocks in order to prevent her fingers from stiffening into claws. She could hardly bear to look. The Kordas had all taken Lia’s neurological catastrophe hard. The entire family had gone through therapy at the Merced County Mental Health Department in order to deal with what Dee called “Lia being dead but alive.” At their counselor’s suggestion, the children—biological, foster, and adopted—drew pictures on butcher paper. “Wendy drew a mom and a baby, because Lia was with her mom,” said Dee. “Julie drew a rainbow with clouds and birds, because Lia didn’t have to cry anymore. Maria is real withdrawn, but when we told her about Lia she cried. Lia got through to her! She drew a broken heart with a jagged fence and an eye looking in from the outside. The heart was the sadness. The fence was the wall that Lia had gotten over by touching our lives. The eye was my eye, watching the sadness, with a tear that cried.”

In 1993, while she was vacationing at Disneyland, Jeanine Hilt had an acute asthma attack, went into respiratory failure, and suffered oxygen deprivation so severe that she lost all brain function: in other words, she developed hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, exactly the same fate that had befallen Lia. She died three days later with her partner of eighteen years, Karen Marino, at her side. “When I heard Jenny was dead, my heart broke,” Foua told me. “I cried because Jenny had told me she wasn’t going to get married and she would never have any children of her own, so she would help me raise my children. But she died, so she couldn’t do that, and I felt I had lost my American daughter.”

Neil Ernst won the MCMC residency program’s first Faculty Teacher of the Year award. Peggy Philp became Merced’s County Health Officer, a post her father had held more than forty years earlier. They continued to share their pediatric practice as well as housework and child care, scrupulously negotiating what one of their Christmas letters described as “a blur of laundry, lunches, cleaning, patient care, newborn resuscitation, and resident teaching.” Their understanding of the Lees, and the Lees’ understanding of them, deepened significantly when they, too, experienced a child’s grave illness. During his last month of third grade, their elder son, Toby, was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. When Neil tried to tell Dan Murphy about the diagnosis, he cried so hard he couldn’t talk. After one of Lia’s checkups, Neil wrote me:

Mrs. Lee had heard that our son had leukemia. It was truly amazing how quickly she heard of this. When Peggy saw Lia in our clinic, Mrs. Lee was very concerned about Toby’s health, how he was doing etc. There was very genuine concern expressed by her questions and facial expression. At the end of the visit Mrs. Lee was hugging Peggy and they were both shedding a few tears. Sorrows of motherhood cut through all cultural barriers.

Toby underwent three years of chemotherapy and achieved what seems to be a permanent remission. “Lia’s mother continues to occupy a special place in our thoughts,” wrote Neil in a later letter. “She always asks about Toby. Our contacts with her are very infrequent because her family provides excellent care for Lia, but they are special nonetheless.”

Since Lia’s brain death, whatever scant trust Foua and Nao Kao had once had in American medicine had shrunk almost to zero. (I say “almost” because Foua exempted Neil and Peggy.) When their daughter May broke her arm, and the doctors in the MCMC emergency room told them it needed a cast, Nao Kao marched her straight home, bathed her arm in herbs, and wrapped it in a poultice for a week. May’s arm regained its full strength. When a pot of boiling oil fell from the electric stove onto Foua’s skirt, setting it on fire and burning her right hip and leg, she sacrificed two chickens and a pig. When Foua got pregnant with her sixteenth child, and had an early miscarriage, she did nothing. When she got pregnant with her seventeenth child and had a complicated miscarriage in her fourth month, Nao Kao waited for three days, until she started to hemorrhage and fell unconscious to the living room floor, before he called an ambulance. He consented to her dilation and curettage only after strenuous—in fact, desperate—persuasion by the MCMC resident on obstetric rotation. Nao Kao also sacrificed a pig while Foua was in the hospital and a second pig after she returned home.

Before she was readmitted to Schelby, Lia was routinely vaccinated against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. At about the same time, she started to develop occasional seizurelike twitches. Because they were brief, infrequent, and benign—and also, perhaps, because he had learned from bitter experience—Neil decided not to prescribe anticonvulsants. Foua and Nao Kao were certain that the shots had caused the twitches, and they told Neil that they did not want Lia to be immunized ever again, for anything.

Dan Murphy, who became the director of MCMC’s Family Practice Residency Program, once told me that when you fail one Hmong patient, you fail the whole community. I could see that this was true. Who knew how many Hmong families were giving the hospital a wide berth because they didn’t want their children to end up like the second-youngest Lee daughter? Everyone in Merced’s Lee and Yang clans knew what had happened to Lia (those bad doctors!), just as everyone on the pediatric floor at MCMC knew what had happened to Lia (those bad parents!). Lia’s case had confirmed the Hmong community’s worst prejudices about the medical profession and the medical community’s worst prejudices about the Hmong.

At the family practice clinic, the staff continued to marvel at the quality of care the Lees provided to their clean, sweet-smelling, well-groomed child. But at the hospital next door, where the nurses had had no contact with Lia since 1986, the case metastasized into a mass of complaints that grew angrier with each passing year. Why had the Lees been so ungrateful for their daughter’s free medical care? (Neil—who did not share the nurses’ resentment—once calculated that, over the years, Lia had cost the United States government about $250,000, not counting the salaries of her doctors, nurses, and social workers.) Why had the Lees always insisted on doing everything their way? Why—this was still the worst sin—had the Lees been noncompliant? As Sharon Yates, a nurse’s aide, told me, “If only the parents had given Lia the medicine, she wouldn’t be like this. I bet when she came back from that foster home, they just didn’t give her any medicine.”

But I knew that when she returned from foster care, Foua and Nao Kao had given Lia her medicine—4 ccs of Depakene, three times a day—exactly as prescribed. Hoping to clear up some questions about Lia’s anticonvulsants, I went to Fresno to talk with Terry Hutchison, the pediatric neurologist who had overseen her care at Valley Children’s Hospital. I had noticed that in one of his discharge notes, written nine months before her neurological crisis, he had described Lia as “a very pretty Hmong child” and her parents as “very interested and very good with Lia.” I had never seen phrases like that in her MCMC chart.

Bill Selvidge had told me that Dr. Hutchison was “a known eccentric,” beloved by his residents for his empathy but dreaded for his insistence on doing rounds at 4:00 a.m. He had an exiguous crewcut and on the day I met him was wearing a necktie decorated with a large bright-yellow giraffe. A sign in the hall outside his office, hung at toddler eye level, read:

KIDS ZONE

ENTER WITH CARE AND LOVE

When I asked him about the relationship between Lia’s medications and her final seizure, he said, “Medications probably had nothing to do with it.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Lia’s brain was destroyed by septic shock, which was caused by the Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacillus in her blood. I don’t know how Lia got it and I will never know. What I do know is that the septic shock caused the seizures, not the other way around. The fact that she had a preexisting seizure disorder probably made the status epilepticus worse or easier to start or whatever, but the seizures were incidental and not important. If Lia had not had seizures, she would have presented in a coma and shock, and the outcome would probably have been the same, except that her problem might have been more easily recognized. It was too late by the time she got to Valley Children’s. It was probably too late by the time she got to MCMC.”

“Did her parents’ past noncompliance have anything to do with it?”

“Absolutely nothing. The only influence that medications could have had is that the Depakene we prescribed might have compromised her immune system and made her more susceptible to the Pseudomonas.” (Depakene occasionally causes a drop in white blood cells that can hamper the body’s ability to fight infection.) “I still believe Depakene was the drug of choice, and I would prescribe it again. But, in fact, if the family was giving her the Depakene as instructed, it is conceivable that by following our instructions, they set her up for septic shock.”

“Lia’s parents think that the problem was caused by too much medicine.”

“Well,” said Dr. Hutchison, “that may not be too far from the truth.”

I stared at him.

“Go back to Merced,” he said, “and tell all those people at MCMC that the family didn’t do this to the kid. We did.”

Driving back to Merced, I was in a state of shock myself. I had known about Lia’s sepsis, but I had always assumed that her seizure disorder had been the root of the problem. The Lees were right after all, I thought. Lia’s medicine did make her sick!

That night I told Neil and Peggy what Dr. Hutchison had said. As usual, their desire to ferret out the truth outweighed their desire—if indeed they had one—to defend their reputation for infallibility. They immediately asked for my photocopy of Lia’s medical chart, and they sat together on Bill Selvidge’s sofa, combing Volume 5 for evidence, overlooked during the crisis, that Lia might already have been septic at MCMC. Murmuring to each other in their shared secret language (“calcium 3.2,” “platelets 29,000,” “hemoglobin 8.4”), they might have been—in fact, were—a pair of lovers exchanging a set of emotionally charged intimacies.

“I always thought Lia got septic down at Children’s when they put all those invasive lines in,” said Peggy. “But maybe not. There are some signs here.”

“I did too,” said Neil. “If I’d thought she was septic here at MCMC, I would have done a lumbar puncture. I didn’t start her on antibiotics because every single time Lia had come in before that, she was not septic. Every other time, the problem was her seizure disorder, and this was obviously the worst seizure of her life. I stabilized her, I arranged for her transport, and then I went home before all the lab results were back.” He didn’t sound defensive. He sounded curious.

After Neil and Peggy went home, I asked Bill Selvidge whether he thought Neil had made a mistake in not recognizing and treating Lia’s sepsis, even though Dr. Hutchison believed that her fate was probably sealed before she arrived in the MCMC emergency room—and even though the increasing severity of her epilepsy might eventually have led to serious brain damage if sepsis had never entered the picture.

“Neil leaves no stone unturned,” said Bill. “If Neil made a mistake, it’s because every physician makes mistakes. If it had been a brand-new kid walking off the street, I guarantee you Neil would have done a septic workup and he would have caught it. But this was Lia. No one at MCMC would have noticed anything but her seizures. Lia was her seizures.”

To MCMC’s residents, Lia continued to be her seizures—the memory of those terrifying nights in the emergency room that had taught them how to intubate or start IVs or perform venous cutdowns. They always spoke of Lia in the past tense. In fact, Neil and Peggy themselves frequently referred to “Lia’s demise,” or “what may have killed Lia” or “the reason Lia died.” Dr. Hutchison did the same thing. He had asked me, “Was Lia with the foster parents when she died?” And although I reminded him that Lia was alive, five minutes later he said, “Noncompliance had nothing to do with her death.” It wasn’t just absentmindedness. It was an admission of defeat. Lia was dead to her physicians (in a way, for example, that she was never dead to her social workers) because medicine had once made extravagant claims on her behalf and had had to renounce them.