Susan was born in Nairobi and grew in Kikuyu. She attended Consolata Primary School, went on to Precious Blood High Riruta and finally to University of Nairobi to study medicine. She pursued her masters in neurosurgery in South Africa.

Susan had a good childhood and gained exposure early in life through the opportunity of travelling with her mother for work. Her mother worked as a Soil Scientist. Meanwhile, her sister is pursuing a PhD in biomedical engineering following their father’s footsteps. A family of sciences!

Influenced by the early 90s HIV/AIDs intimidating photos used to create awareness with the slogans AIDS KILLS, Susan thought as early as primary school that she needed to become a doctor.

After her internship, Susan veered off the internal medicine that HIV/AIDS involved for the thrills of surgery. Neurosurgery came in because she found neurology very challenging and thought this was a good point to match neurology and surgery.

Besides that there are a mere three female neurosurgeons currently practicing in Kenya and a total of less than 40 neurosurgeons spread over Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, Eldoret and one in Nyeri. The World Health Organisation recommends at least one neurosurgeon to every 200,000 people. Kenya requires about 200 more neurosurgeons to serve the population.

“Getting into medicine here is competitive and you need to be an A student. High school was tunnel vision for me, medicine equals As,” she says with a giggle. Her cohort’s first assessment in medical school saw grades ranging between 9 and 30 percent. This was a shock to them as they were used to being A students in high school; this was a whole other ball game.

“You will get broken down and built into the image of your teachers,” the lecturers would tell them. Susan says you lose who you are, any carefree nature and you actually start becoming the image of your lecturer. This is what sometimes gives doctors that standard character, she explains.

Most doctors become as close as family to each other, having shared profound experiences together.

Kenyan degrees are viewed as inferior and therefore getting into masters was not easy, explains Susan. The process took long to register with the medical boards in the country, but once there, the university said Kenyan doctors do very well. Quotas for foreign trainees are also limited – only two for the slot in neurosurgery that Susan had been applying for. “My family assisted me in meeting the cost and my partner, whom I was not married to at that time, was also extremely supportive. After the first year, the cost goes down as you work and it is subsidised,” explains Susan, who even planned her wedding remotely while in South Africa. She returned briefly to pick vendors and left her then fiance planning the rest of the wedding.

“Two weeks after my wedding I was back to school,” she smiles.

In Susan’s opinion, being married to a fellow doctor makes it easier for him to understand why she was compelled to pursue that masters and the demands it made of her. Being on call is the difficult part for a non-doctor to sometimes understand. One could be out at night on call for a whole week day after day. With a fellow doctor you share your rotas and plan around it.

With a 5 years masters in Durban, South Africa, Susan has devoted over 10 years of her life to studying medicine. A long distance marriage is difficult but they made it!

Planning family time needs one to be very intentional in her career. “I try to spend time with my family on weekends when I am not on call and also evenings unless I am on call or it is an emergency.
Sometimes we are both coincidentally rushing home to spend time with our eight month old baby, and we meet at the corridor,” Susan says.

Without creating a balance you could be singing to the bank but unhappy, Susan says. “As a female doctor you already have to work twice as hard. There is still the perception of family restrictions and anticipated maternity leave. It is more intense in surgery. You have your baby but sometimes you have to stay at work,” says Susan.

Trauma from accidents is the heavy burden on neurosurgery – you would not say no to a casualty. Tumors can be planned and are actually easier to incorporate into a work/life balance.

Losing a patient is always very difficult especially when it seemed promising but turned out contrary. Sometimes you will move away to cry it out. Talking with her closest doctors helps.

“I talk to my husband a lot. Formal counselling for doctors is not in place in Kenya yet and we lose many colleagues to substance abuse. If it gets really severe it is better to take a break from operating to recover,” Susan says.

Many of her happier memories are around children. One that stands out is a child admitted in the intensive care unit who woke up from a coma.

Susan examining an x-ray

On a typical day, Susan wakes up from 4:30 am. She prepares clothes and food for the baby for the day then gets to work usually at around 8 am. Her morning starts with ward rounds. Thereafter she attends to incoming patients. On some afternoons, Susan teaches undergraduates. With post-graduates students, she sometimes has classes at 7 am. If there’s an emergency, she could end up in theatre at night and of course when she is on call that whole schedule becomes erratic.

Susan notes that the procurement of equipment required for neurosurgery has improved at the KHN. A lot more students are now studying neurosurgery in Kenya and this should significantly alleviate the gap in the ratios. Patients in a better financial situation would get treatment in private hospitals, but the doctors are the same doctors who also treat the patients at the KNH.

Susan’s hope is to see more female doctors specialising in neurosurgery: Though it is thought to be prohibitive, it’s what you make of it, she says. Surgery needs the heart of a lionness and the hands of a lady – it does require that delicacy and finesse that women possess.

She also foresees Kenya becoming a leader in neurosurgical research on the continent because we have some very well trained specialists.

When asked if neurosurgeons are wealthy, Susan explains that to get crazy rich means you may never sleep and that increases chances of malpractice. Doctors usually invest in other areas, real-estate and the like, to boost their wealth. “But you will be wealthy in your contribution to society; appreciation of life is also our wealth as doctors,” she says.

The next step for Susan is to further sub specialise in vascular neurosurgery that deals with the vessels of the brain. She is currently searching for a fellowship on scholarship. It is not available locally but she is planning to come back and serve Kenya.