Sunday Profile /Dr. Desirae Molly McKee
Surgeon lends hand to poor
When the power went out during surgery in the Central American operating room, Dr. Desirae Molly McKee, with flashlight in hand, offered light in the darkness.
The surgeon from Elma knows the world of medicine from the streets on up. She started out as a volunteer for an ambulance company in New Orleans and went on to earn her medical degree.
In addition, she’s also a certified ice and rescue diver.
McKee, who became a hand surgery fellow in 2006 at the University at Virginia, moved last year with her family to Western New York after accepting a position at Excelsior Orthopaedics in Amherst.
“We moved here because the Buffalo area is a great place to raise a family,” she says. “Our family was specifically looking for a location that still had small-town values, hard-working people.”
Born in a large Irish-Catholic family in St. Paul, Minn., a younger Desirae — second oldest of six children — learned early on the value of education.
“There wasn’t anything we couldn’t do,” she says.
McKee has been on medical missions to Honduras and Mexico and will return to Guatemala at her own expense for nearly two weeks this summer. She will separate fingers fused together from birth, fix broken bones that didn’t heal properly and, through plastic surgery, take care of burns that have gone untreated.
There are many “unmet needs for medical care” in Guatemala, she says, and that is why she is once again joining the Guatemala Healing Hands Foundation. The volunteers evaluate hundreds of children — who have no access to medical care — for hand surgery.
Long ravaged by civil war, the nation ranks among the poorest of Latin American countries, with most of its population of about 13 million very young and under the poverty line.
“Patients are so grateful,” she says.
Every penny of donations to the effort goes directly to costs such as medications and diagnostic tests so these children can use their hands.
Have an idea about a local person whose life would make a good profile or a neighborhood issue worth exploring? E-mail lcontinelli@buffnews.com
Or write to: Louise Continelli, The Buffalo News, P. O. Box 100, Buffalo, NY 14240
