PHYSICIAN SPOTLIGHT

MOTIVATED BY a desire to make a difference in some of the world’s most desperate places, medical mission trips not only drew Brevard, Florida physicians Steve and Kellie Griffith together as a couple, it’s a commitment that now defines their life.

DOCTORS Steve and Kellie Griffith pose for a family photo with their children Alex and Sydney on the boardwalk at the beach when Kellie was first assigned to Patrick Air Force Base in Florida following her medical school training and residency. Steve is an emergency medi- cine physician at Cape Canaveral Hospital.

Steve will never forget the first time he saw the woman who would become his wife. Kellie was a second-year medical student at the University of Missouri and fresh back from a one-month medical mission trip to Mexico. As she manned a booth for Students Interested in Global Health for Tomorrow, up walked Steve, just out of the Peace Corps and reporting for his first day of medical school.

It’s a Love Story
“My pick up line was, ‘Hi, are you the president of the club this year? Great. I will be your replacement next year,’ ” recalls Steve, who’s now a 34-year-old emergency medicine physician at Cape Canaveral Hospital. “Our first date was an International Medicine conference in Chicago.”

It’s a love story with all the makings of a romantic comedy, but with a heartbreaking punch line. In August 2007, Kellie, a Major in the U.S. Air Force, was unexpectedly deployed to Afghanistan, leaving Steve to care for their two small children while juggling his career with Space Coast Emergency Physicians.

“In the beginning we decided not to tell the kids she was in war,” says Steve. “We’ve told them she’s helping people in a hospital in the mountains in Afghanistan.”

Kellie is a psychiatrist — an expert in the stress and emotional toll of military life thanks to a medical degree paid for by an Air Force scholarship. In return she owed 12 years of military service, a commitment the Griffiths thought would be served stateside, especially after their son was diagnosed with epilepsy. Military rules required the Griffiths be stationed at a place where he could get specialized care. That wound up being Patrick Air Force Base, close to a pediatric neurologist, a relatively rare specialty.

MAJOR Kellie Griffith, MD is a psychiatrist with the 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base who has been in the US Air Force for 13 years. Maj. Griffith says a highlight of her deployment was speaking at a conference in Ghazni Province for 90 Afghani doctors and the Ministers of Health and Women’s Affairs. Those doctors returned to their district to train their colleagues, improving the nation’s ability to treat mental disorders, which are four times as common in Afghanistan as in the United States.

“In Lieu of Deployment”
Then Mother’s Day weekend in 2007, Kellie learned that President Bush’s planned troop surge had led the U.S. Army to execute what’s known as an “In Lieu of Deployment” order and demand her service at the Combat Stress Control Clinic at Bagram Air Base. She never fought the unexpected deployment, saying at the time, “I will not dishonor my country or the path I have taken. I will answer the call to duty as I have pledged to do so.”

Steve and Kellie’s extended families responded by taking turns coming to Florida to help care for the Griffith’s son, now seizure free for more than two years, and their then 4-year-old daughter. Steve switched to an overnight shift to be “Dr. Mom” by day and he decided to return to the very cause that had brought him and Kellie together — a humanitarian medical mission.

He applied for a late November trip to Kabul, Afghanistan, sponsored by CURE International, a non-profit Christian organization that brings medical help to developing countries. He admits that his motivation was partly humanitarian and partly in the hopes of visiting his wife during a scheduled 72-hour “R&R” break.

For three weeks, he helped instruct young physicians taking part in Afghanistan’s first Family Practice residency program. “I went with donated medicines and materials to teach Advanced Cardiac Life Support,” says Steve. “They’re offering this training to try to keep these doctors in the country. Without it, most of them would have left for training overseas. You raise the standard of care over generations by convincing them to stay.”

FACE OF HOPE: Fatima — the memorable cover image from March/April 2008 edition of Space Coast Medicine & Healthy Living magazine — “lives” in an abandoned home and cares for her two brothers. Her mother was hospitalized and her father was killed in the Afghan conflict, a situation that experts estimate impacts some 60,000 children who now spend the majority of their time on the streets of war-ravaged Kabul.

He would also help out in the CURE Hospital’s emergency room and meet a young girl he knew only by her first name, Fatima — the girl whose haunting image is seen on this magazine’s cover. She lived in an abandoned house with no roof, raising both her younger brothers while her mother was hospitalized.

“Her father was killed in the conflict and she is only able to feed her siblings by begging,” says Steve. “She knows that the kitchen at the hospital is a reliable place to get scraps of bread and leftover rice, so I found her nearby there at lunchtime each day.  Despite it all, she can still manage a smile.  This is the face of hope in Afghanistan.”

It’s those encounters with the people of Kabul that made a life-changing impression on Steve, especially since that planned visit with his wife never took place; Kellie’s time off was cancelled due to an unexpected mission on the other side of Afghanistan.

“Just the experience of being over there was very positive and helped me relate to what she’s going through,” says Steve. “I now realize she’s helping to stabilize the country. Seeing that it is getting better helped.”

He’s been a person who looks for that silver lining since he was a young college student who was torn between a calling to both ministry and medicine.

“I had been premed since about age 14, but I went on a Christian mission trip my freshman year of college. That was when I wondered if I was cut out for seminary, and my hometown minister encouraged me to pursue my own unique talents, reinforcing that God works through people in different ways, using their different gifts.”

DR. GRIFFITH with an elder of the Pashtun tribe (the same ethnic group who had formed the Taliban in the 1990’s) who sought treatment for longstanding arthritis exacerbated by years of hard manual labor. He returned three days later with tears of joy at being able to walk normally again, and brought the ER staff pears he had grown in his garden.

So he chose medical school, following in the footsteps of his older sister Susan Schneider, MD, who is with the Brevard Health Alliance clinic system as a primary care physician for patients who cannot afford care through the traditional medical system. “It would be my younger sister who would eventually be the one in my family to go to seminary and become an ordained minister,” says Steve.

Kellie continues to share her husband’s commitment to humanitarian mission work. In an email from Afghanistan she wrote, “Even though our medical system has its difficulties, it is very advanced. I feel it is important to share that knowledge with the rest of the world.”

Steve plans to travel to Haiti on a mission trip with his church later this year and is anxiously awaiting word of when his wife’s deployment might end, with hopes that she’ll be home or on her way back as this article is published. He calls Kellie’s work in Afghanistan “the ultimate humanitarian mission” since she’s making a difference for battle-scarred soldiers and supporting U.S. efforts to return some sense of peace to the region.

“I was crushed to have traveled half way across the world and to not have been able to see my wife in person,” says Steve.  “But my time in Afghanistan helped me to put human faces on an otherwise very abstract political topic. It allowed me to see the Afghan’s suffering and understand the price of progress being paid over there, and that made my own family’s personal sacrifice worthwhile.”

DR. GRIFFITH with an elder of the Pashtun tribe (the same ethnic group who had formed the Taliban in the 1990’s) who sought treatment for longstanding arthritis exacerbated by years of hard manual labor. He returned three days later with tears of joy at being able to walk normally again, and brought the ER staff pears he had grown in his garden.

Related posts:

1. OPERATION RAINBOW: The Color of Hope
2. Bringing Hope to the Hopeless
3. HOSPICE CARE: Love, Hope, Understanding and Courage
4. Medical Professionals Donate Time, Talents on Prep Sidelines
5. Medical Mission Work Changes Lives