Dr. Vernon Henderson:
A Long Way From
Weed
Dr. Vernon Henderson can recall the
exact moment he knew that he wanted to do more than patch
patients' broken bodies as they passed through the Trauma
Center at Oakland's Highland Hospital, where he has
worked as a trauma surgeon for nine years.
It was not long after Henderson came to
Highland. He was sitting at a conference table with the
rest of the surgical staff, discussing the week's most
complicated cases, a weekly exercise formally known as a
morbidity and mortality conference. Doctors refer to it
as the "M & M session".
At this particular meeting, Henderson
listened as his colleagues presented six cases --six
gunshot victims, and six young black men, each under the
age of twenty, dead.
"And [at that meeting] it dawned
on me for the first time that all these young men had
families, had mothers who loved them and who were really
going to miss them," Henderson said. "I was
just sort of observing the doctors in the room, how this
had become such a matter of routine. I wondered where we
were headed as a society, where we were headed as
individuals, that that sort of thing just didn't grab us
and really get our attention."
Henderson's first reaction, after that
meeting, was to despair. He thought about getting out of
the trauma department or of leaving Oakland altogether.
Then Henderson met Deane Calhoun whose
group Youth Alive! works with Oakland teens to provide
young people with alternatives to violence. She convinced
Henderson that, as a trauma surgeon who sees the effects
of violence firsthand, he had an important point of view
to share.
He began to volunteer at Youth Alive!,
then branched out to speak at Oakland schools. He is also
a participant in -- and forceful proponent of--youth
programs run through Highland. Sonji Walker, who
coordinates the "Model Neighborhoods" program
at Highland calls Henderson, now director of Highland's
trauma department, her "best salesman."
One student Henderson met through a
Highland mentorship program confided that he had been
resistant to the idea of coming to the hospital.
"This young man asked me,
"Why is it that everyone who comes to Highland
dies?'" Henderson remembers. "I told him that
it wasn't true that everyone who comes here dies and I
asked him why he had that opinion."
The 15-year old junior high school
student explained that his cousin and two brothers had
all died at Highland. Gunshot victims, all three.
Henderson, 43, grew up far from
Oakland's urban sprawl in a tiny town called Weed.
Henderson said the town, situated in California's far
north at the base of Mt. Shasta, was home to about 3,000
when he lived there, with perhaps 200 African Americans.
His father was minister of the Baptist church and a
member of the Weed city council. His mother was active in
the church and in the community. Henderson was
quarterback of his high school football team and, though
his comfortable girth may now belie it, a star track
athlete. He was a good student and remembers being
popular and well-liked in the town.
"It was a good environment for
developing self esteem," Henderson says of Weed.
After Weed came undergraduate studies
at UC Davis and med school at Stanford University.
Henderson watched as African Americans from less
sheltered backgrounds struggled to overcome cultural and
racial differences.
"I understood immediately how
difficult it was for [African Americans] who grow up in
the city to maintain the kind of focus I was able to keep
[in Weed]," Henderson said.
He entered medical school planning to
work in an inner city community once he'd completed his
training. Shortly after he agreed to come to Highland,
Henderson got a tempting offer from a private hospital on
the island of Oahu, Hawaii. He never wavered.
And Highland's Trauma Center, where the
average age of admitted patients is 25 and the beds are
filled by gunshot wounds and knifings as often as car
crashes, has come to feel like home.
On a recent Thursday, a 32-year old
Oakland woman turned a gun on herself and fired, tearing
a hole in her midsection. Henderson operated on her for
several hours, but she died shortly after midnight.
Henderson was back at the hospital the next morning for
the weekly 7:15 a.m. M & M session.
Every day is a struggle to keep such
cases from becoming all too routine.
"One of the ways doctors protect
themselves is to remain detached from what actually
happens to their patients, but you have to fight against
getting that tough core that prevents you from
feeling," Henderson said. "One of the things
that gives you the greatest joys and the highest highs in
medicine is to be able to feel that satisfaction when
something good happens to people."
Henderson lives in Oakland with his
wife and five children; his youngest is 18 months old,
his eldest, an 18-year-old freshman at Hayward State.
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