“I Knew She Was Out There”

Holly O’brien’s patient was just being nice.

 

- Marc Peyser

She probably didn’t realize that South Korea has more than 50 million people or that there are over 1.7 million Korean Americans living in the United States. She just thought it was interesting that O'Brein didn’t know Meagan Hughes, another Korean American nurse working on the same floor—and the same shift—at Doctors Hospital of Sarasota. “You should talk to her,” the patient told O’Brien, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “Maybe you’re from the same town.”

After O’Brien and Hughes finally met, they did begin to notice parallels in their lives. They were both certified nursing assistants. They were both orphans who had been adopted by American families. And their reasons for ending up at the orphanage were the same: abandonment. “So I said to her, ‘I know this is crazy, but what is your last name in Korean?’” recalls Hughes, now 45. “And as soon as she told me Shin, I said, ‘No way. That’s my [Korean] last name too.’”