Dr. Alexa Canady
Reported by Erik Smith
Web produced by Rachel L. Miller

Dr. Canady operates on a patient. Video

It's another day in the operating room, another patient on the table, another fragile life in the balance at the end of her fingers. And when it's done, two lives that cross just briefly under the glow of a surgical lamp will be forever united.

They will be emotionally and spiritually sutured, bonded not with just some medical thread and a needle, but by knowledge, clinical skills, love, admiration and grateful appreciation.

The room, the building, might as well be home for Dr. Alexa Canady, chief of neurosurgery at Detroit's Children's Hospital.

Since we are a society obsessed by firsts, it's almost an obligation to say that she is the first African-American female brain surgeon in America. That said, she'd like us to move on to the important stuff like all those little children that she sees every day who are often in desperate need of her exceptional skills.

Dr. Canady smiles at her young patients.

Her IQ is somewhere out there with the national debt and she graduated cum laude from the University of Michigan. She has a radiant smile and optimistic appraisals of the real values of life. She knows her achievements have made her a role model for young people, and it is those very young people that own her heart.

"I think they view life on a day-by-day basis," she says. "They're not worried about what's going to happen next week or next month. It's what's going to happen five minutes from now and that lets them live the moment and I think we as adults could do better with that."

It's probably a little hard to believe, but it may also bring comfort to some of us to know that Dr. Canady's academic career wasn't just an endless string of straight A's. She actually wound up on academic probation at one point for skipping classes.

"I had trouble because I didn't know what I wanted to do," she says. "I cannot study just because I'm supposed to study. I had lost mathematics as a dream. When they get to the same point, they think I'm stupid, I can't do anything. I think it's important to talk about it."

It's easy to say that success runs in doctor's family. Her brothers are all lawyers; her father is a retired naval officer. Her grandmother taught Latin and Greek after graduating from a school in the South.

So when it was Alexa's time to choose her own path in life, she, too, found that the glass ceiling was firmly in place and still reinforced incidentally with a heavy glaze of racism.

Dr. Canady is the chief neurosurgeon at Detroit's Children's Hospital.

"I think you always have to remember when you go to train from someone that what you want is the training, and not a validation of your individual self," she says. "As a minority person, you learn that early on. I don't care whether they like me. I'm not going to count on them for my sense of self-worth."

She says if she had it all to do over again, she'd still want to go into the same field.

"That's the best thing I can ask."

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