Meet Sharee Wright

Call it irony that the newest member of MUSC Health’s vascular surgery team spent some of her childhood and early adolescence in Jamestown, S.C.

It’s not because Dr. Sharee Wright, a highly skilled endovascular surgeon, attended middle school and started high school in the rural community, smack in the middle of the Francis Marion National Forest.

It’s because Jamestown, one of the state’s most notorious speed traps, couldn’t stop Dr. Wright, from traveling full speed toward her goals.

She laughs when she recalls the officers who kept vigil at the community’s four-way stop, surprising motorists eager to get to Georgetown, Charleston or McClellanville.

“Everybody knows you can’t speed through there,’ she says. The speed drops off dramatically, so you have to look for landmarks like certain houses to know when to really slow down,” she says.
Dr. Wright’s road to success was an academic one. Her landmarks were academic opportunities, early scholastic successes and dreams of a dual career. “At first, I wanted to be a police officer and a doctor; then I wanted to be a writer and a doctor, and in high school I wanted to be an interior decorator and a doctor. Becoming a doctor was the one constant,” she says.

She credits her mother, one of three women who guided her, pushed her and never gave up on her, as the biggest influence in her success. “My mom did everything possible to make sure we all got the education we wanted and that we reached our goals,” she says. “She always found a way to make it happen, and I didn't realize how hard that must have been for her until I became an adult.”

As a divorced mother raising four children while holding down three jobs, her mom, Vivian, set the bar high. “My mom is very big on education. She expected us do our homework and to get good grades. She never said, ’No, you can’t.’ She would say, ‘Wanna be a doctor? You’ve got to get the grades.’”

And as a dutiful daughter who didn’t want to disappoint her mom, Dr. Wright complied. With a touch of her trademark dry humor, she says, “I’m still afraid of her. She’s a powerful 5’1” even though she likes to think she’s 5’3.”

If Vivian set the bar high, it was the late Evelyn Parsons, her 4th-grade teacher at Bonner Elementary, who set the pace for her scholastic career. “Mrs. Parsons was called ‘the mean teacher,’” she says. “Nobody wanted to be in her class, but she set the tone of how you become successful – that you’ve got to stick to it. She held us to task and never let us slack off.”

For her final two years of high school, she was accepted at the Governor’s School for Science and Math in Hartsville. The experience was eye-opening. “I was exposed to students from across the state and different cultures. My classmates were Hispanic and Indian. I knew I wanted to broaden my horizons.”

She wanted to leave the comfort of South Carolina and attend college out of state, and when N.C. State offered her scholarships and grants, she headed to Raleigh, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology with an eye on attending medical school.

After graduation, she enrolled in MUSC’s post-baccalaureate program, a yearlong curriculum designed to prepare minority students for medical school. That’s where she met Myra Haney Singleton, associate dean of student affairs in the College of Medicine, AKA “influential person No. 3” and “godmother” to her and her classmates.

“She was always there to take care of us,” Dr. Wright says. “She was that mom on campus when our moms were at work. She always encouraged us and never gave up on us.”

After earning her medical degree and completing a surgery residency at MUSC, first African American woman to do so, she entered the vascular surgery fellowship program at Temple University. Two years later, Dr. Wright headed to practice in Richmond, convinced that the Lowcountry would remain in her rearview mirror except for visits with friends and family.

But it was those very visits that prompted a turnaround in her thinking – and ultimately her direction. “When I would come home, I’d see so many people with bad vascular disease, and they didn’t know what it was,” she says. “They’d say, ‘‘’Grandma always had discolored legs,’ or “’that a person had an amputation from eating too much white bread.’ I wanted to make a difference, and if my purpose is to help people in these communities stop dying early, that’s what I’m gonna do.”

She says her shared history with African Americans in the Lowcountry, growing up in a family where nothing could be taken for granted and achieving any goal required struggle and sacrifice, gives her a special perspective for working with her patients.

“I’ve lived these experiences through my family,” she says. “I like to think I relate to what they’re going through. Not all of them are financially savvy, and their families are not medically literate.”

And then she tells this story: “One day I was with an attending in a clinic, I watched as the patient nodded in agreement while the doctor rattled off a bunch of information for him. When the doctor left the room, I asked him, ‘Did you get any of that?’ He said, ‘No.’ He was afraid to ask. After I explained everything to him, he said, ‘’You get where I’m coming from.’”

Dr. Wright says every blocked artery, every leg cramp, every aneurysm is part of a larger story that must be factored into a successful treatment plan. “I understand why patients can’t take six weeks off work without pay, or why the long-haul truck driver has to keep going. I’m passionate, but I’m straightforward. I tell them what’s gonna happen if they don’t listen. But if you address those issues and if you can develop a plan of care that builds in time for that trucker to pull over and walk every few hours, and put it in terms they understand, there’s a much better chance that they’ll accept it.”

As she prepares for her new role, Dr. Wright is aware she’ll become a role model, and she’s looking forward to sharing her experiences and mentoring aspiring minority and female physicians.

And what would she tell them?

“It sounds so simple,” she says. “Push for it and don’t shrink away. Stand in the front, make yourself visible, make yourself heard. Be in the moment. At conferences, ask a question. The fact that you got out of our seat, went to the microphone and stated your name gets you noticed. Remember: You’re just as qualified to ask questions as everybody else.”

Dr. Wright admits that, even with her scholastic successes, she sometimes doubted whether she, an African American female, really belonged in medical school and residency, a feeling exacerbated because no one else looked like her.

“There were no minority female surgeons, no one who could say, ‘I’ve been through it.’ I can tell them that I struggled for money and worried how I could go on my residency or fellowship interviews and afford a hotel. But just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean it’s not gonna happen. I want to be that person for other people.”

Then she relates one more anecdote, one that leavens her own words of inspiration.

“When I was on rounds as a medical student, I walked into a patient room and saw my 4th-grade teacher. I asked, ‘Mrs. Parsons, do you remember me?’ She looked straight at me and said, ‘I know who you are, and I always knew you could get here.’

“To hear those words and to know how much she had believed in me was special. She knew I could get here.”