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Dr. Priya Khanna, a nephrologist, and her father, Dr. Satyender Dev Khanna, a surgeon, died on April 13 and April 21, respectively, after contracting the coronavirus, two of the many doctors who were affected by the pandemic. Their deaths were publicly announced Thursday by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who praised the family’s dedication to health and medicine, and said his administration “will commit in its memory to save as many lives as we can.”
New Jersey, a state with a large Indian-American community, has lost more than 8,000 people to the coronavirus pandemic, the second highest in the country after New York.
Priya Khanna, who had received her medical degree from the Kansas City School of Medicine in 2003, was infected with the virus in late March or early April, and her condition had become severe shortly thereafter. “The plasma donor urgently needed my beautiful young sister who dedicated her life to helping others,” her sister, Dr. Suganda Khanna, tweeted on April 8.
They found a donor with one day, but five days later, the family announced Priya’s death, saying: “Our beautiful Priya passed away on 04/13/20 at 3:27 am. She was the light of our family with him! heart of gold and he had a contagious smile! A piece of our heart is gone and we will miss him forever. ”
Dr. Satyender Khanna, who was also infected at this time, died a week later. “Our loving and caring father, Dr. Satyender Dev Khanna, passed away today to be with my sister Priya. He was a gentle soul and deeply loved by his girls. My dad loved riding a bike through the water, ”Dr. Anisha Khanna said in a social media post on April 21. A photo of Dr. Khanna showed him cycling along the Jersey shore with the Statue of Liberty in the background.
The Khannas are widely known in the Indian community as a rare family of doctors. Dr. Satyender Dev Khanna’s wife, Dr. Kamlesh Khanna, is a pediatrician, and of Priya’s two sisters, Dr. Suganda Khanna is an emergency physician and Dr. Anisha Khanna-Sharma is a pediatrician.
Dr. Satyendra Dev Khanna graduated from the Maad Azad Faculty of Medicine in New Delhi in 1964 and came to the United States in 1966 with six dollars in his pocket as a staff of Indian immigrants in the 1960s. “I didn’t even know if I had enough money for the taxi ride from Newark airport to Elizabeth General Hospital, where I had to start my internship and live. But my dad had a medical degree, this was priceless,” wrote Priya and Anisha in Good Health magazine from Clara Maas Medical Center in NJ, where she worked for 35 years.
The daughters recalled how they followed their parents to medicine because it was simply a part of their daily lives since they were children. “My mom and dad opened their practice next to our house. We used to help out at the office every summer and volunteered at Clara Maas Medical Center in grades 6 and 7. My mother and father have been on the CMMC staff for as long as I can remember, “they wrote.
The father and daughter will be there forever, in a sense; both died in CMMC.
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