But he and his wife, Marcelina Hernandez Lopez, had so many questions.
What medications was he being given? How was the virus affecting his body? And, most importantly:
Would he survive?
No one at Mercy Hospital Southwest in Bakersfield spoke the couple’s language, Mixteco, an indigenous language from southern Mexico. Hernandez, 62, didn’t know he had the right, under state and federal law, to request an interpreter, and the hospital didn’t offer him one.
His wife was beside herself. “I feel a lot of sadness in my heart, because I don’t know what’s going to happen to my husband, and I don’t know what his condition is,” she said through an interpreter on Feb. 19, as her husband lay in a hospital bed. “He’s suffering a lot in that place … He tells me people come and give him injections, he wants to know what they are, but he doesn’t understand.”