St. Paul Pioneer Press
Thursday May 7, 2020
By DEANNA WENIGER
Haweya Farah’s relationship with her father, Mohamed Hamud Omar, had been complicated and at times discordant over the years.
But in the weeks leading up to Omar’s death, Farah was his strongest advocate and the only family member allowed to be with him when he died April 29 from COVID-19.
“I was a mess. I called my family,” she said. “I read the Koran. I took the gloves off. I touched his face. I told him he was loved.”
Omar, 74, lived in a Minneapolis apartment after immigrating from Somalia about five years prior. He had been recovering from knee surgery done five months earlier, but was otherwise healthy, his daughter said.
Mohamed Hamud Omar, 74, of Minneapolis, died from COVID-19 April 29, 2020. (Courtesy of Haweya Farah)
He had been staying inside, taking his meals from family members who delivered them to the front door of the apartment complex.
Yet, despite his precautions, he began feeling ill April 7.“My dad was a very humble man,” Farah said. “He wouldn’t tell you if he was having pain. He didn’t want to alarm us.”
It took a week before he admitted he was not getting any better, and a stern talking to by Farah, who invoked a passage from the Koran, to get him to do a virtual visit with a doctor.
Farah’s 20-year-old brother, who had been staying with Omar, called Farah in a panic two days later, telling him Omar was having trouble breathing.
Farah, who has worked as a respiratory therapist and currently works for a company that transports lung donations for transplants, was concerned. She got him admitted to Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, but when he tested positive for the coronavirus, he was transferred to Bethesda, the St. Paul hospital currently housing COVID-19 patients.
With her father in isolation, Farah was frustrated by being cut out of the loop. She pestered the doctors and nurses, trying to advocate for her father. With her knowledge of the respiratory system, she asked specific medical questions and offered advice.
COVID-19 patients are often flipped onto their stomachs or sides in a treatment called “proning” which can help a patient breathe easier and delay use of a ventilator. She weighed in on that decision, as well as whether to induce a coma and later to intubate him.
But nothing worked.
“When they showed me an X-ray of his lungs, they were completely whited out,” she said.
Farah said the hospital made an exception for her, since she was in the medical field, and allowed her to be with him during his last hours, with the understanding that she would then have to quarantine herself.
“I sat peacefully with him for a couple hours. He looked so beautiful,” she said. He was buried the day after his death.
Omar was an elder in the Somali community, a title given not due to age, but rather experience and leadership.
“He was just a kind soul for everybody who met him,” she said. “People listened to and respected him.”
Omar’s death compounded Farah’s grief, having just lost an uncle in Ethiopia possibly to COVID-19, a nephew to a sudden death, and learning her aunt in a dementia care center has been diagnosed with COVID-19. She urges Somali community leaders to do better in communicating the seriousness of the virus.
“We need to help the elderly,” she said. “We’re being impacted disproportionately."