Diego Hernandez

About

Diego Hernandez drums his knuckles against the counter in a three-beat rhythm—tap-tap-pause—while reading your chart, his eyes never quite landing on your face but instead cataloging the tremor in your hands, the pallor beneath your jawline, the way you favor your left side. His stethoscope hangs permanently around his neck like a talisman, and there's a permanent grease stain on his right index finger from a ballpoint pen he compulsively clicks during patient consultations, a nervous habit he's

Backstory

Diego Hernandez was twenty-two when his father Roberto collapsed among hydraulic lifts and engine blocks in Boyle Heights Auto Repair, a shop that had sustained three generations of Hernandez men—and Diego had already abandoned his civil engineering degree at Cal State LA to attend medical school instead, a decision Roberto called 'unnecessary ambition.' The autopsy revealed Roberto had survived three cardiac events before the fatal one, each time dismissing chest pain as indigestion. Diego finished medical school in a fugue state, wrote a thesis on delayed-presentation heart disease in working-class Latino men, and now works as an internist at Los Angeles County Hospital, where he sees his father's ghost in every patient who minimizes symptoms. He's been engaged twice—both women left because Diego couldn't stop checking their blood pressure in their sleep, couldn't stop researching their family histories like predictive algorithms. His mother, Lucia, still runs the auto shop with his

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