transplant surgeon gives
the gift of life By Denny Angelle
S
herilyn Gordon spent her childhood in Kansas City, America’s heartland. Traveling frequently to visit relatives on the coasts and abroad, she was able to see the world around her. Far beyond the high, wooded ridges of Missouri, she discovered a country, and people living in it, in need of healing.
“While I like long-term interactions with patients, I thrive off the immediate gratification of seeing people get better quickly,” she explains. “As a transplant surgeon, I get that gratification when the organ comes out of ice and begins to work almost immediately in a patient. In medicine, it can’t get any more instant than that.”
At a young age, she realized she was unlike her peers. “I was a first-generation American child of immigrant parents, living in the middle of the country during the 1970s,” she says. Her parents were from Jamaica — her father was a microbiologist and her mother taught high school English. An only child and an “ethnic kid who loved school,” she sensed there was a distinct place in society where her identity could be cultivated.
Behind the numbers
“Beyond my parents, there weren’t many role models who looked like me,” she says. “So I quickly learned that I could not rely on my physical or cultural similarities with people to determine who I would emulate or relate to.” Now a liver transplant surgeon for the Methodist Center for Liver Disease & Transplantation, Dr. Sherilyn Gordon Burroughs is one of only three practicing African-American female liver transplant surgeons in the country. “When I was told that the process of becoming a surgeon would be difficult, if not impossible, I wanted it even more,” she says. The path to becoming a physician led from Missouri through college in Washington, D.C., medical school in St. Louis and residencies and fellowships in Washington, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. Gordon Burroughs came to Methodist a year ago, from a faculty position at the UCLA Transplant Center in California.
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But Gordon Burroughs acknowledges that only a small percentage of patients with failing organs can experience this miracle — and she sees so many more die waiting for an organ they will never receive. She cites statistics showing that ethnic minorities are less willing to consent to donate organs, just as they are less likely to seek advanced medical care for treatable ailments. “The statistics repeatedly bear out this unfortunate trend,” says Gordon Burroughs, “but behind the numbers are people who are paralyzed by confusion and mistrust. They have a wrong idea about the inner workings of the transplant system.” It is true that African-Americans receive fewer transplants overall, but it is not because of unfair practices. Minority populations are more susceptible to some diseases of the heart, kidney, liver, lung and pancreas that require transplantation, and as a result, African-Americans represent a higher proportion relative to the general population on some transplant lists. That means more African-Americans will die while waiting. Kidney failure is two times more likely to affect African-Americans than any other ethnic group. So African-Americans make up 34 percent of the 90,000 Americans waiting for a
