This woman woke up from surgery to see that her black doctor had perfectly braided her natural hair away from her incisions
India Marshall woke up from surgery to see that her black doctor had perfectly braided her natural hair away from her incisions.
Video Transcript
JEWEL GREYWOODE: African-Americans feel more comfortable going to a Black doctor. It dates back many hundreds of years. They don't trust other doctors, which is understandable. You see things like Henrietta Lacks in the Tuskegee experiment.
INDIA MARSHALL: It's important to have people that can identify with us and that don't have bias when they see us and believe us. And it can be the difference between life and death.
I've dealt with bone growths on my forehead region in between my eyes. I met with a couple of different surgeons over the years. Starting this year, I'd kind of made more of an effort to reach out to and find more Black doctors.
JEWEL GREYWOODE: Black physicians, they're not a lot of us. My medical school class, out of over 100, there were only three of us.
INDIA MARSHALL: When I met with him, everything went great. And he offered me some options that no other surgeons had. And I felt comfortable with him because I felt like he really cared about me.
JEWEL GREYWOODE: Typically, patients are wearing a surgical cap. Once I took the cap off, I saw that she had thick, dark, curly hair like my daughter's hair. I knew that she had done something to help protect her hair during surgery. Having two daughters and having curls night is what we call it at our house with my wife and I, braiding has always just been something that I've done for their hair.
Undid the braids just where I needed to get access to. And afterwards, I used staples because every time you cut stitches, you tend to cut hair. Nobody wants to have their hair cut or shaved.
INDIA MARSHALL: When I woke up and we took the bandages off, [INAUDIBLE] said, oh, somebody braided my hair. It must have been nurses. It made it easier to clean the incisions. My hair wasn't, like, in the way. We said, yeah, that was really nice for whoever had done it.
JEWEL GREYWOODE: About a week later, she came in, and I took the staples out. I said, hold on, these braids look a little better than mine. And then she kind of looked up at me like, what?
INDIA MARSHALL: You did the braids? And he's like, yeah. I knew he seriously knew about doing natural hair. So that was a shock for me. That simple gesture of him seeing my hair is important, and he wanted to preserve it was really special.
They had responses from a lot of different people that they never even thought about actively seeking out Black doctors and how they would now. I feel like there is a level of care and connection with Black doctors and Black patients that we don't necessarily always get.
JEWEL GREYWOODE: The person that you are interacting with is an actual person, a family member or somebody else. And you don't necessarily have to expect a viral reaction. But it definitely is important to make the other person that you're talking to feel seen. But I think her bringing awareness to it highlights and is very timely for what's going on in our country.
