Trained in T.O., she’s Rwanda’s only female neurosurgeon
She survived childhood scarred by genocide to fulfil her dreams
As a child growing up in Rwanda during the 1980s and ’90s, Claire Karekezi dreamed of becoming a doctor. But what she calls her “guiding star” has taken her far beyond that initial goal to join the ranks of what is perhaps medicine’s most demanding specialty.
In early July, the 35-year-old will return home as the first and only female neurosurgeon in Rwanda, says Toronto Western Hospital, where she has spent the last year honing her skills in neuro-oncology and skull base surgery, specializing in the removal of brain tumours.
Providing that service to brain cancer patients in a country with only one hospital-based MRI and few CT scanners will be a daunting task, but it’s one Karekezi is determined to overcome, just as she has all the challenges and sacrifices needed to fulfil her childhood dream.
It was a childhood scarred by the 1994 genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people in the African nation, a bloodbath that retired Canadian general Roméo Dallaire and his inadequately manned contingent of UN peacekeepers were powerless to prevent.
“I always tell people that that’s what sort of made us who we are today as Rwandese people, because we grew up knowing that we cannot count on anyone but ourselves.
“So this kind of spirit kept me going, to do whatever it takes to get where I want to go,” she said. “I keep pushing because the genocide happened, the whole world was watching and no one did anything. But we came through that, we are a strong nation, and we have very brave people who have managed to do impressive things now.”
Karekezi can surely count herself among their number.
After finishing high school in 2001, she was awarded a full government scholarship as an outstanding student to study medicine at the University of Rwanda in Butare, the city where she was born.
In 2007, with a couple of years left until she graduated as a doctor, Karekezi applied and was accepted as an exchange student to study at the University of Linkoping in Sweden through the International Federation of Medical Students.
It was her first time away from home. But it was July, and the only department in operation through the traditional summer-holiday period was neurosurgery, an area of medicine she’d never considered.
Serendipitously, she found herself taken under the wing of department head Dr. Jan Hillman, who led Karekezi to the operating room and had her scrub in to observe surgery on a patient with a brain tumour.
“That was the first time I saw the brain,” she said.
Hillman became her first mentor, explaining and demonstrating to Karekezi the intrica- cies of the brain and encouraging his protege to embrace the complex specialty and eventually practise it in Rwanda, where at the time there was not a single neurosurgeon.
Back at home, she continued reading texts about neurosurgery on her own while finishing her medical degree. A month before graduation in 2009, she was accepted for a short neurosurgery program at Oxford University in the U.K. Determined to follow her dream, she kept emailing the head of the Rabat Reference Center for Training Young African Neuro- surgeons in Morocco, seeking a spot in the program that had been set up under the auspices of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies.
She was finally accepted after securing government funding and moved to Morocco in 2011, spending the next five years immersed in learning the specialty. In her final year, she was named chief resident.
In 2013, she had been given a Women in Neurosurgery award sponsored by Dr. Mark Bernstein, a neurosurgeon at Toronto Western Hospital, who holds the Greg Wilkins-Barrick Chair in International Surgery.
Though they hadn’t met in person, Karekezi contacted Bernstein about applying for one of four annual fellowships at Toronto Western in neurooncology. Having heard about her through the Women in Neurosurgery award and from an African colleague who knew her, Bernstein decided “she would be a very worthy candidate.”
So last July, Karekezi arrived in Toronto, ready to tackle the final stretch of what has been a 12-year journey.
When she returns to Rwanda in July, Karekezi will take home not only her skills in neurosurgery, but also a mental blueprint learned in Toronto of how to more efficiently deliver services to patients, by smoothing the paths between surgeons, oncologists, radiation therapists and other care providers.
Her next dream is to collaborate with her colleagues — there are four male neurosurgeons now practising in the country of12 million people and a fifth is just finishing his training — to work toward developing such a multidisciplinary neuro-oncology centre.