By Mahlon Meyer
Northwest Asian Weekly
Dr. Umair Shah, secretary of health (Courtesy of Washington State Department of Health)
Here is a man who has taken on the burdens of many. And despite the chaos around him manages to remain composed and on task. Umair Shah tells the story of his life despite repeated interruptions, and he models the kind of calm intensity that Washingtonians have become familiar with since he took over as secretary of the department of health in December 2020.
His mother had a stroke 30 years ago, which changed his life. He was on his way to law school, after having been inspired by a popular Hungarian philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University. He had dumped his original major of Molecular Biology, and while his friends were already getting responses to their applications to medical school, he was preparing for a life of legal or policy work.
But he reversed course immediately.
“My sister and I often talk about the fact that our parents absolutely took care of us when we had needs as kids, and we feel and felt very strongly that it was our responsibility to take care of them when they had needs as seniors, as people with health issues,” he said.
Since then, his mother, who is in a wheelchair and requires extensive care, has lived with him.
In Texas, where Shah worked as an emergency department doctor, the family supplemented their care of her with multiple professional caregivers.
His father, too, until he passed away several years ago, also lived with the family and required that level of care.
Shah said it was “part of his Asian heritage.”
When he first moved to the greater Seattle area, his mother stayed back in Texas, but recently moved into his home, and he and his wife are now again responsible for her care. His wife, who still has a dental practice in Houston, has had to commute in recent weeks. They have three young children to care for as well.
The care provider that came with them from Texas abruptly left. So besides fighting a global pandemic in Washington state, Shah now bathes his mother, cleans her up, stretches her, feeds her, gives her medications, monitors her for dehydration, and watches for infection. He recently took her to the beach for some mental relief.
“It is not easy. You have to be devoted to it.”
Without his wife, of 17 years, who he describes as “incredible” and “amazing,” and friends and family, it would have been impossible.
Behind his drive, however, is an earlier image. It again involved family. When Shah was 7, he saw his father suddenly grow violently ill. Although he did not know it at the time, his father had developed a severe bout of intestinal inflammation that required surgery.
“All I saw was the writhing and what I remember as screaming in pain.”
But after his father disappeared into surgery, he came out later calm and seemingly restored.
“And you know what? He was healed. And I always equated that with the doctors and nurses who were caring for him,” he said. “And any time I thought of swaying from medicine, there was this thread that pulled me back. Shah was working two jobs the summer he took the tests for medical school. After work at a cancer research lab, he would rush home and put on a Pizza Hut uniform to deliver pizzas until two in the morning.
In medical school, his yearning for something broader reasserted itself. He wrote letters to the World Health Organization and was accepted for study there.
“I’ve always had this interest, because of my immigrant background or because of having immigrant parents, in giving back to underserved areas.”
After that, it was a tug of war between his desire to apply himself globally, or on a policy level, and the needs of a given community, or person, that he could tackle as a doctor.
While in college, he had thought of joining the Peace Corps and traveling to sub-Saharan Africa to work in a village. But he realized he “had to take care of his family first.”
As an emergency department doctor, however, he traveled to Kashmir and then later to Haiti to respond for earthquake relief—the first of many responses to global and domestic disasters.
But even then, he was torn.
“My daughter was born in September of 2009, and a few months later the earthquake happened. I was down there in the middle of Port-au-Prince with an NGO co-located with the 82nd Airborne, sleeping in a tent and I remember thinking, ‘I’ve been here almost one-sixth of my daughter’s life.’”
Even his childhood was a seesaw. His family had immigrated to Cincinnati, but his mother’s sister, who was still in Pakistan, developed breast cancer. So, his mother traveled back to see her, pregnant with Shah, and he was born there. After his aunt passed, they returned when he was six months.
Later, however, he returned to Karachi for first and second grades, which advanced his understanding of living in other environments. Then he was in Cincinnati until college.
After medical school, he spent the next 25 years as an emergency department physician at Houston’s VA medical center. During that same time, his interest grew in public health and he eventually transitioned on to become chief medical officer of the Galveston County Health District. He then moved on to lead 700 public health staff serving 4.7 million residents in the nation’s third largest county as the head of Harris County Public Health.
It was there that he gained experience leading the county through countless hurricanes, chemical incidents, novel H1N1, Ebola, Zika and most recently on the frontlines of COVID-19. Since taking over in Washington, as of press time, over 78% of the state’s eligible population has received at least one dose of vaccine and 72% have been fully vaccinated. Shah has also responded to equity concerns, adjusting policy to meet the needs of marginalized communities. He ordered hours extended at mass vaccination sites held by the state in response to community feedback.
Ongoing adjustments to the state’s vaccine locator tool have made it quick and efficient. Using it, the Northwest Asian Weekly was able to find a vaccination site in seconds. The site has helped millions secure vaccine appointments, according to a press release.
But in the end, the personal disasters have required more than the global ones.
Shah was among the responders to one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in history, Hurricane Harvey in 2017 that destroyed parts of Texas and Louisiana.
“But I don’t know if that was harder than the following year when my dad was hospitalized nine times in the ICU,” he said.
For 32 days, Shah and his sister took turns sleeping in the hospital, caring for their father, who was on dialysis and became septic in the process.
“I had to care for him as a primary care doctor and a son as our health care system is largely broken. It is even harder right now with COVID because so many families cannot even be with their family loved ones in the midst of this horrible, horrible challenging time when their loved one gets worse and has a respiratory issue and they’ve not been allowed to be in the room with them.”
As for his father, Shah said, “He never came home.”
This health series is made possible by funding from the Washington State Department of Health, which has no editorial input or oversight of this content.
Mahlon can be contacted at info@nwasianweekly.com.