Koreatown Family Hoping For A Miracle After Father, Grandmother Die From COVID-19
KOREATOWN (CBSLA) — When the stay-at-home orders first went into effect to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, the Kim family happily hunkered down in their Koreatown home.
"I was enjoying quarantine," Hannah Haein Kim said. "I was having so much fun not going to school, working from home."
Hannah said the family made the most of their newfound time together having no idea how limited that time would be.
"My whole life turned upside down in a blink of an eye," she said.
Hannah's father and grandmother both tested positive for COVID-19 around the same time back in April. Hannah said she believes that her father contracted the illness from one of his acupuncture clients and that her grandmother was exposed to it at the nursing home she had been recently left.
Once the virus was inside the home it spread to her mother, her younger brother and even herself.
"We couldn't smell," she said. "We lost our sense of smell."
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That was the only symptom Hannah and her brother ever developed, but their 85-year-old grandmother Sun Soon and 68-year-old father Timothy both died from the illness.
"Our dad was the most special person to both my brother and I," Hannah said. "And I cannot even imagine living without my mother."
Though Hannah's mother Eun-Ju officially survived her bout with COVID-19, she suffered irreparable damage to her lungs.
"Her lungs are just dead," she said. "They're just gone."
Hannah said her mother's only chance for survival is a double-lung transplant.
"Today she wrote me a little note saying, 'Am I alright? Am I going to be alright,'" she said. "You know, it's just heartbreaking."
Eun-Ju is the only parent Hannah and her brother have left, but they said she is also the strongest woman they know.
There are currently about 1,400 people in the United States on the national transplant waiting list for a donor lung.
Hannah hopes that a local hospital will find a way to save her mother's life.
"If I really had a choice, I would do it for my mom," she said.
A GoFundMe page has been set up in an effort to ease the family's financial burdens.