Stepping together to tackle trauma
Audrey Reny and Juan Pablo Herrera-Escobar are different people from different parts of the world, but they’ll be competing in the Boston Marathon for deeply personal and similar reasons.
The Reny family was in the wrong place at the worst time at the 2013 Boston Marathon. Herrera-Escobar’s medical career was forged in the violence of Cali, Colombia. The experiences instilled driving passions in both to research and improve trauma care, and that’s why they’re running the marathon to raise money for the Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation.
The Renys’ story is sadly familiar among the thousands of lives disrupted by the 2013 Marathon bombings. Danielle, their oldest daughter, was running the race for the first time. Gillian, her younger sister, was waiting for her at the finish line with their parents, Audrey and Steven, who live in Boston.
The bombs went off, and a different kind of race began. Audrey and Steven were injured, but it was Gillian who suffered the most serious trauma. She was rushed to Brigham and Women’s Hospital and quickly went into surgery. Doctors assessed the damage to her lower body and initially feared her left leg might have to be amputated.
As the weeks, months and surgeries dragged on, it became clear that doctors at Brigham and Women’s had saved Gillian’s leg, even though she still faced a long and difficult recovery.
The Renys searched for a trauma care organization to get involved with to express their gratitude, but didn’t find what they were looking for. With an attitude and spirit emblematic of their family, Boston and its medical community, they eventually decided to start their own movement.
The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Fund was established to raise money for trauma care and research. It raised millions of dollars in just months. Money poured in and the fund became the Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation, which opened in January 2017 at Brigham and Women’s Building for Transformative Medicine.
“The reason we started this was we assumed there would be something that we could just perhaps make a donation or get involved with an organization that was doing something for trauma survivors, and there wasn’t,” Audrey Reny said. “We ended up creating this so that now we are a passionate voice and a community of clinicians, researchers, and laypeople all advocating for funds to enhance and improve trauma research and care.”
Herrera’s path to the Stepping Strong Center began in his hometown of Cali, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the world. He treated patients for wounds from gunshots, land mines, grenades and more, and as his career progressed he started to look toward the bigger picture of trauma care and recovery.
“It was very frustrating for me to see how a lot of people were dying in our hands without us being able to do something for them. Most of them were very young people. That’s something that really touched me, because I felt that I could be one of them at some point,” Herrera-Escobar said. “I felt that the work we were doing there at the hospital was not enough . . . . We were treating patients and the next day it was just going to be more patients, over and over again.”
His work brought him to Brigham and Women’s in 2015 as a trauma researcher at the Center for Surgery and Public Health. He also has a passion for running and completed his first marathon in Chicago in 2015, so he was a natural fit in the Stepping Strong fundraising team.
“The general community thinks that trauma is unpredictable and there is not much we can do to prevent trauma or improve trauma,” said Herrera-Escobar. “I truly believe and there’s a lot of research that supports that trauma can be predictable. We can absolutely improve outcomes, not only in the short term but in the long term, which is another field that has been very neglected as well within trauma.”
The rise of the Stepping Strong Center has coincided with Gillian’s own remarkable recovery. She graduated from Penn last year and found a job working in New York City. Less than five years after nearly losing one of her legs, Gillian has progressed to the point where she was able to go skiing this past winter.
A group of 140 people — including Juan, Audrey and Steven — will run the marathon for the center created in Gillian’s name. They’ve raised over $1 million for this year’s run, bringing the total to over $13.5 million to date.
“I really believe there is much more good than bad in this world, and this is an affirmation of that,” Audrey Reny said.