Most of us have a desire to forget the traumatic COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Memorial Day and Veterans Day beckons us to the frontline health care providers who saved lives across our many wars, including the pandemic.
For International National Day on May 12, the San Diego State University School of Nursing screened the 2023 documentary “Nurse Unseen,” honoring the contributions of Filipino nurses in the U.S., apt as May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
“Nurse Unseen” explores the little-known history of the Filipino nurses who risked their lives on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic while facing a resurgence of anti-Asian hate on their way home, part of the quotidian harassment that anyone of Asian heritage faced. One nurse in the film reminded us that not only did they face mental health trauma from seeing patients die, but then from the racial discrimination they faced after leaving the hospital.
Paying tribute to these often-unseen heroes, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, serves as a moment to reflect back on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, known as the “Spanish flu,” which killed 50 million to 100 million people in a year. The flu was deadlier than the Second World War.
Films such as “Saving Private Ryan” memorialize soldiers who gave their life during that War, yet there is no film about “Saving Nurse Ryan,” such as the one who worked at an overwhelmed Army camp hospital, writing on Oct.17, 1918, how she was at the side of four officers who died, retreating to the nurses’ quarters to navigate the trauma on her own.
We often those who died for a nation on the battlefield, but we too often do not pay homage to the nurses or the patients who died during a pandemic, because they were not felled by enemy bullets, defending the flag. They were killed by an unseen enemy.
Yet harkening back to the example of Clara Barton during the American Civil War, nurses prevented more soldiers from dying on the battlefield by simply introducing soap to prevent battlefield infections.
The World Health Organization estimated that up to 180,000 health care workers could have died from COVID-19 from January 2020 to May 2021.
As the film reminds us, during COVID-19, anti-Asian prejudice had been inculcated on a global level since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020, due to the reference to COVID-19 as the “China virus” or “kung flu.” Similar prejudices today are directed towards migrant farm workers caused by another pandemic — racism.
Yet COVID-19 did have a few silver linings, such as the introduction of telemedicine as people learned how to use Zoom or Microsoft Teams — which improved health care accessibility for some of our most marginalized populations in California.
As I watched “Nurses Unseen,” I could not help but think of my mother, Sabah Al-Marashi, who provides telehealth care primarily for uninsured farm workers in Salinas Valley. Every Wednesday night in Encinitas, she logs onto a computer as a volunteering nurse provider for the RotaCare Foundation.
In 2011, my mother started the nonprofit’s diabetes program, which includes medication and nutritional guidance. Before my mother started this program, one of her patients, a man in his 20s, died after he could not afford insulin.
It is apt that International Nurses Day began just after Mother’s Day, as so many nurses are mothers.
My mother is also a professor of nursing, and I fondly sitting in her classes as a child. It is one of the reasons I ended up engaging my students in the history of public health.
At SDSU, through my “Plagues Through the Ages” initiative, my students document testimonies of health care providers, contributing to the social history of COVID-19. Some of those students already work in the field, shining a light on the vital role California State University campuses play in preparing the next generation of health care professionals.
My mother speaks to those students about her work in Seaside, as well as with the Development and Relief Foundation’s Imam al-Hujjah hospital, established in Iraq after 2003 by mostly Iraqi Americans. Many of those SDSU students had parents who fled Iraq in 2003, many settling in El Cajon.
It delights me when I see one of my Iraqi students, Miguel Maroghi, ask my mother about my diabetes care during their interaction.
We didn’t get a day off for Nurses Day, but we should as San Diego’s and the world’s nurses and medical practitioners — past, present and future — deserve to be celebrated.
Al-Marashi is associate history professor at California State University San Marcos and visiting lecturer in the School of Public Health at San Diego State Univeristy. He lives in Encinitas.
