Stories that stayed with us from 2021 - Los Angeles Times

It wasn’t just anyone who collected the bodies of the hospital’s COVID victims. It was Karl

Dr. Courtney Martin reached for her phone, opened the notes app to an empty screen and began to write.

I want to write about Karl. This is a long essay, but it’s because I love to write. Perhaps it’s my therapy, and perhaps it’s because Karl deserves to be noticed. Every hospital has a Karl.

Martin is the head of maternity services at Loma Linda University Medical Center, an accomplished physician and surgeon, a dynamic presence.

Karl is an all-but-invisible man. He works in the massive medical center’s dispatch department, wheeling patients from hospital rooms to radiology for MRIs and CT scans. He does not like attention. Martin, however, wants the world to know who Karl is and what he does. She calls him “this healthcare hero.”

Due to the pandemic, Karl became the person who moved the dead bodies from the rooms, then took them to the morgue. Maybe this was a job before the pandemic — I’m not sure. And, on the surface, this doesn’t seem that bad. But in a pandemic, Karl became the body collector.

As a 9-year-old, she was saved at sea. Thirty-five years later, she reunited with her rescuers

Kept afloat by her orange life jacket and the bow of her family’s capsized boat, 9-year-old Desireé Rodriguez had watched helplessly as one family member after another let go of life.

Just as she, too, began to give up, the skipper of a commercial sportfishing boat spotted an orange smudge...

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