Trauma Doctor Has Heart for Rough Michigan Community

FLINT -- The 15-year-old gunshot victim Dr. Craig Copeland saw was "bitter" and -- worse, in Copeland's eyes -- rude to the grandmother fretting over him.

It's something that stayed with the Hurley Medical Center trauma surgeon.

Months later, that teen was ambushed and killed in one of the more than 50 slayings in Flint that year.

"Some of these young men are young enough to be my children," said Copeland, 44. "They don't see a way out, and they've accepted violence and difficult circumstances as a way of life. They're surviving, not living.

"Someone has to show them there's hope."

So when caring for patients in a city numbered among the nation's most violent, one of the instruments Copeland chooses is compassion.

Copeland came to Flint from Henry Ford Health System during a trauma fellowship in 2005. With little prodding, he returned to the staff permanently last summer.

His white doctor's coat can go a long way in exuding credibility, but as a black surgeon with the ability not to pass judgment on how tragically messy life can get, he's making inroads with a young generation.

"I'd never really seen that," Michael Martin, an 11th-grader at Flint Northern Academy, said of the surgeon who looked like him. "He came across as a buddy. Told me to stop horsing around."

It's advice he will need to take to turn good grades into a career in basketball or law, and he will need to avoid the roughhousing that landed him on Copeland's operating table several weeks ago.

The 17-year-old had been kicked in the abdomen and his pancreas nearly damaged. But 28 stitches later, he's on the mend.

The young men matter to Copeland because his upbringing was not much different from theirs.

Copeland's mother went from housewife to federal employee after his parents split. Extended family -- aunts, uncles and a grandmother -- filled the gaps in childrearing.

Siblings still lived in and around the Washington area while Copeland worked his way through Brown University in Providence, R.I., and then Howard University College of Medicine.

"It was hard work, but not impossible," he said of jobs in research, lumberyards and a moving company.

His current lifestyle and job is mind-numbingly intense.

Melanie Mata, trauma program manager, said surgeons like Copeland -- one of seven at Hurley's top-notch trauma center -- are "captains of the ship."

Mata said 78,000 patients a year go through the emergency room, and at least 7,000 are trauma patients.

"We see everything but in greater volume than other Flint hospitals," she said.

Actually, they see more than most hospitals throughout the state. In Genesee County, Hurley sees by far the most gunshot wounds. Mata said a Flint surgeon sent to Iraq was the only one in his Army unit to have seen an AK-47 wound because of his experience at Hurley.

But flying bullets account for only 20 percent of Hurley's ER trauma traffic. The rest is some of the state's worst car accidents, burns and -- this time of year -- hunters falling out of tree stands.

The variety of mishaps makes Hurley attractive for training. But Copeland's rigorous fellowship included surgical critical care work that trained him to fix, then follow patients to the intensive care unit rather than hand over care to an intensivist.

"I've seen him called everything but his own name by a man in the ER who was shot and belligerent," said Mata, a registered nurse. "He doesn't get frustrated by the poverty, desperation or the way we are talked to sometimes. He takes it. He takes it poetically because he understands the community.

"He told the man, 'I'm not the enemy. I'm here to help you.'"

When Copeland left in 2006, Mata said she remembers thinking, "I hope we do whatever we can to get Craig back here."

The wish came true when he returned in July, partly to continue working with his mentor, Dr. Farouck Obeid, chairman of trauma services and a former Henry Ford surgeon.