By Diane Rogers
The photos Sherry Wren, MD, brought back from the Democratic Republic of Congo aren’t your typical summer-vacation shots.
On her computer screen, an armored personnel carrier lumbers down a rutted road. She scrolls to another page, which shows an 8-year-old boy with an infected gunshot wound on his leg. “It’s from a high-velocity military weapon that makes a big hole when it comes out,” Wren explains. “The exit wound is really bad.”
Wren, a specialist in gastrointestinal cancer surgery as well as a general surgeon at Stanford Hospital & Clinics, recently spent her third summer in Africa with Doctors Without Borders, an international medical humanitarian organization that helps people in some 60 countries. After working in Ivory Coast and Chad, Wren was assigned last summer to the DRC. “The Congo is the most under-reported humanitarian crisis, with 6 million dead, millions displaced and thousands dying each day.”
Assigned to Rutshuru hospital in North Kivu province, near the Rwandan border, Wren spent four weeks doing caesarean sections, skin grafts, amputations and orthopedic surgeries—many without benefit of high-tech instruments and resources available in the United States. “You have no idea how physically hard it is to crank a six-millimeter pin into someone’s femur with a hand drill,” she said. “And I’m strong.”
A professor of surgery and associate dean of faculty affairs at the School of Medicine, Wren scrubbed in with Stanford colleagues in obstetrics, orthopedics and plastic surgery to prepare for the range of surgeries she would have to do in Congo. But much of the care she provided was more fundamental. “There are minimal lab tests, and you’re really doing things the old-fashioned way: you touch the patient and talk to the patient.”
On occasion, Wren said she also had to make decisions about whether to perform certain procedures. “In Congo, where rape is used as a tool of war, you see women with fistulas that are difficult to repair,” she said. “And you have to decide, ‘Am I going to do more harm, doing something I’m not prepared for and don’t have resources for? Or am I going to do more good by choosing to do a surgery?’”
Although Wren did some teaching about how post-op recovery is approached in the States, she calls herself the “ultimate student” and said she learned a lot from the nurses she worked with. “They know all the local diseases and the weird complications of sickle cell anemia.”
Currently chief of surgery at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Wren has spent her career in county and VA hospitals. The summer missions with Doctors Without Borders are an extension of her desire to help those who need it most. “I really believe in a culture of service, and I want to go into communities where you are caring for acute needs.”
Because of her work with the organization, students at the School of Medicine often turn up in Wren’s office to ask about doing similar altruistic work. “There’s a lot of interest in doing international medicine, but I’m not sure students have quite matured in their thinking about how they’re going to do it,” she said. “I do it once a year, and that’s easy. But how do you build a practice, how do you put food on your table, how do you have a family? I think they don’t quite understand what the parameters mean.”
Wren and a contingent of volunteer surgeons currently are lobbying Doctors Without Borders to bring senior residents with them on future assignments. “They send you into stressed places where you have to be fairly flexible,” she said about what she’s learned from her three stints in Africa. “It really is rewarding.”