Dr. Velma Scantlebury, one of only two African-American women transplant surgeons in the United States, knows what it’s like to compete with men. Now, having earned her place next to the country’s esteemed male transplant pioneers, she’s not afraid to have a little fun at their expense.
Relaxing in her office at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, she pulls out a favorite birthday card, which reads: “It’s your birthday. Try to be the center of attention. Only do things that make you happy. Talk about yourself all day. You know — pretend you’re a guy.”
She has a right to laugh. After all, Scantlebury, 40, is not only an associate professor of surgery at the Thomas E. Starzl Transplant Institute, but she’s also a campaigner for organ donation, mentor to medical students, community award winner, wife and mother of two.
Her rise from Barbados schoolgirl to colleague of the illustrious transplant pioneer Dr. Thomas E. Starzl is an against-the-odds story fought with dogged determination.
At age 13, the shy and bookish girl was brought to Brooklyn’s tough Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood by her parents, who wanted to make a life for themselves in the United States.
In Barbados, she had been well-schooled in the classics, such as “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet.” When she went to check out a book at her new school, the librarian told her she was too young to be reading Shakespeare.
“I didn’t fit in,” Scantlebury says. “I wasn’t born here, and I didn’t have as many friends entering high school, and I was always in the library. I was a nerd, to say the least. I was always reading, and that worked against me.”
The move to a big-city public girl’s school, where violence and muggings were commonplace, was a shock.
Then, when she began to think about college, a guidance counselor suggested she get a job instead. Scantlebury was not to be led astray.
“I was always very quiet, shy, introverted. I was never one to really express my feelings in terms of what I wanted to do and what I saw myself becoming. I wasn’t very verbal, and that might have played a negative role in what they saw as my abilities,” she says.
Although she was accepted to some bigger-name colleges, she stayed close to home and chose Long Island University, which offered her a four-year scholarship. Next was medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, where there were only 10 blacks out of a class of 148.
There she hit another roadblock when her faculty adviser didn’t think she could make it as a surgeon and recommended other areas of medicine.
“Medical school was tough,” she says. “If you were female, it was OK to be a pediatrician, or a gynecologist, obstetrician or dermatologist. I definitely wanted to be a surgeon, but it was so male-dominated a field that most men felt women were too fragile to be able to cut it.
“For women to enter surgery, you really had to be sure of yourself and be in for a fight because there was a lot of competition. Even though I was shy and quiet, I was also very, very stubborn. I think my determination is what has helped me each step of the way.”
The skeptics told her she was too small, that she would need a step stool to operate. There were times the snickers and the sexist jokes got so bad she would tape an inspiring message on her mirror that said, “Yes I can,” just to help her get through the day.
After an internship and residency in general surgery at Harlem Hospital Center in New York City, Scantlebury came to the University of Pittsburgh in 1986. She worked under the direction of Starzl, who had received the attention of the world in the late 1980s with his innovative transplantation practices.
For Scantlebury, she was Dorothy in Oz. But working the liver circuit was erratic and required surgery on short notice. Although she conducted transplants while nine months’ pregnant, she eventually switched to kidney transplantation, which allows a greater window between the time a donor is found and surgery begins. With a husband, professor Harvey White, and daughters Akela, 6, and Aisha, 4, it was a sensible move.
“Having a career and having a family are compatible, but you have to realize there are also some sacrifices you are going to have to make in order to create that balance,” she says. “Sometimes I go home and say I wish I was a man. I wish I had it so easy. I could stay here in my office and do research and write until 9 o’clock, but I’m the mom, I’m the wife, it’s my obligation.”
Her role as a rarity among doctors, women and African-Americans has afforded Scantlebury the ideal platform as a campaigner for organ donation in the black community. African-Americans are traditionally wary of the white medical establishment, she says, and are reluctant to donate their organs for a variety of cultural and religious reasons.
“That’s frustrating, particularly because blacks suffer disproportionately high rates of renal disease caused by hypertension and diabetes,” she says. Although blacks make up 12 percent of the population, one-third of all patients on kidney dialysis are black. The Center for Organ Recovery and Education, a non-profit organ procurement organization says there are 33,571 people awaiting kidney transplants, 11,749 of whom are black. Only 9 percent of blacks donate their organs.
“African-Americans as a group are fearful of organ donation. The people I talk to still aren’t willing to donate. It’s because of those underlying myths out there and distrust of the medical community,” she says. We must reach “the leaders of the churches so they can tell the congregations that it’s OK to donate. It’s not going to (mean that) the pearly gates will be closed because you’re missing a heart or two kidneys or your liver. That’s not going to determine your spiritual hereafter.”
She and other physicians such as Dr. Clive Callender, director of the transplant center at Howard University Hospital in Washington, have campaigned for a change in the national guidelines on organ sharing, which traditionally have been based on how well the antigens in the blood of the patient and the donor organ match. Blacks, who have a complex antigen setup, are not going to match at the same rate as Caucasians, for example, and their waits are longer. They have argued that with the advancement of immunosuppression, which can decrease the risk of rejection, less emphasis should be placed on matching — a position that is slowly being accepted by the United Network for Organ Sharing, the body that establishes the guidelines, Callender says.
“If you want to avoid long waiting lists, find a living donor, find a spouse, a cousin — as long as it is somebody compatible who truly and honestly wants to donate a kidney to you — then you will do just as well,” Scantlebury says.
Although Scantlebury works on adults and children, her office is filled with inspiring pictures of kids who have survived the grueling procedures.
“It’s sad when you see little kids come in. They are only 7, 8 or 9, and they’ve already had three transplants. The ones who come in here (for their fourth transplant) always send my adrenalin going because you feel like you are really on the line. When you get to No. 4, you really want to be sure you’re doing what’s in the best interest of the patient.”
Barbara Barlow, professor and chief of pediatric surgery at Harlem Hospital Center, says Scantlebury immediately caught her attention as an intern. Under the intense pressures of training and the emotional decisions involving children, she never lost her cool, never dissolved into tears and always remained in control.
This is an incredible accomplishment. To succeed as a woman in many fields of medicine, you have to work twice as hard as men and be really goal driven, really focused, Barlow says. There was no way anyone was going to stop her.
Callender says Scantlebury achieved legendary status at Howard University when she assisted in that hospital’s first liver transplant. And although she has achieved so much with the odds against her, he would like to see her rise to the next level.
“If we were in a world that didn’t have sex or race as a critical feature, she would probably be at the full professor level or maybe even chairing a department at this point. She’s doing extremely well, but she could be further along,” he says.
Scantlebury does not rest on the laurels of a double minority success story. She doesn’t dwell on who did or did not come before her. In fact, she hopes her presence will make it easier for the next black transplant surgeons in the ranks. She is a mentor to students and this year was awarded the Woman of Spirit Award for her competent and compassionate service in personal and professional life by Carlow College, a private Catholic liberal arts college for women in Pittsburgh.
“One of the things I usually tell students,” she says, “is to try to not let others’ perceptions of your own abilities interfere with your perceptions of what you’re able to achieve. If you let those intertwine, then you begin to believe what they say is true.”
