Santa Rosa doctor finds strength, purpose while overcoming adversity

Abdul Harris rarely saw a doctor growing up. His impression of hospitals was formed by Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, a troubled facility on the rough divide between the city of Compton and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“Killer King” was a place where you went to die, after you’d been shot, stabbed or abused in some other fashion. Or so the boy believed. He never saw the inside of the hospital. Just hustled past it on his way to school.

Decades later, Abdul Harris still walks with purpose. Only now, he’s the man making the rounds.

At 45, Harris is chairman of the surgery department at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and a member of the hospital’s trauma team. He mentors students at Piner High School and also volunteers to perform surgeries through a Bay Area organization called Operation Access, which recently honored Harris with its legacy award. The group has donated surgical and specialty care to nearly 1,100 patients in Sonoma County since 2001.

Harris doesn’t have to imagine what life is like for those who lack health insurance or other means of affording medical care, as his own family at times relied on public assistance. When he visits his childhood home on the border between Los Angeles and Compton, he almost always has the same thought: “How the hell did I get out of here?”

It’s a triumphant story few outside of his inner circle know. People marvel at his dedication as a surgeon, and as a family man raising four daughters and a stepdaughter in Larkfield, without fully appreciating what sparked the fire.

It’s not a topic of conversation one normally has in the emergency room when lives are on the line.

“When Abdul Harris is on, it’s all business. Frankly, if I was a patient, I’d want that kind of leader in the room,” said Jan Gritsch, who manages the Trauma and Acute Care Surgery Program at Memorial.

At the hospital on a recent Thursday morning, Harris walked the halls at a brisk pace. He wore a white coat, blue Crocs and a red and white badge that identified him as an “MD.” On his wrist was a bright yellow Casio G-shock watch - “The watch that never breaks.”

While making rounds, he entered a rotunda with photographs of the hospital’s chiefs of staff on the wall. His photo is there, the only black face.

Asked whether the photo means anything special to him, Harris paused long enough to say, “Not really. I’m usually too busy to notice.”

Pressed, he slowed up a little more.

“Yeah, to think I was only 41 when I made chief. Oh, man.”

At his Fourth Street office earlier that week, Harris reflected on the journey that took him from Los Angeles to Santa Rosa, saying there is no way it could have been predicted.

“If anyone here that I know (in Santa Rosa) could take a trip back with me to that time, or even go see it (his childhood home) as it exists today, they would be amazed,” he said.

The story has roots in Longview, Texas, east of Dallas, where Harris’ father, Raymond Harris, came of age during the civil rights era. He escaped the segregated South by earning a football scholarship at Pepperdine University in California, only to experience crushing disappointment when the school dropped the program and he had to return to Texas. He fought his way back to the West Coast to finish college.

Raymond got married, started a family. But still imbued with what he called a “militant, anti-society” outlook on life, he named his firstborn son Abdul in hopes the boy would find strength and purpose in the moniker. In Arabic, Abdul means “servant of God.”

“I always told him to be a leader, not a follower,” said Raymond, who is now 71 and lives in Carson, a suburb of Los Angeles.

Raymond and Abdul’s mother divorced when Abdul was in grade school. Abdul and his younger brother, Ray, stayed with their father. Their older sister, Veronica, went to live with their mother, who was - and still is - a licensed vocational nurse.

Raymond held a good job as a computer analyst, but living in Los Angeles, he and his sons were exposed on a daily basis to societal ills ranging from gangs to drugs. Violence was exploding across the metropolis, fueled by the burgeoning crack cocaine epidemic.

Abdul remembers his home being burglarized one Christmas and later spotting some of his family’s presents at a neighbor’s house. On another occasion, his brother came home from the store wearing only his underwear and a cardboard box after thieves made off with his clothes.

“You could walk left two blocks, but not right two blocks because you lived in a certain area,” said Kelvan Gamble, Abdul’s best friend since the third grade, when the pair played Pop Warner football on the same team. “When we caught the bus, we made sure to not wear certain colored laces or else our shoes would get stolen.”

The pair avoided trouble because of their reputations as athletes and academics. Harris also attracted attention for other reasons.

“That deep voice he has now, he had that in sixth grade,” Gamble said. “When the teacher called roll, all the girls would wait for him to say, ‘Here.’ He had green eyes and he was muscular, so girls loved him.”

Raymond Harris said he involved his sons in sports to keep them off the streets. He stuck Post-it notes around the house with inspirational messages for them to read and absorb. He told them they shouldn’t expect something for nothing, and that they were limited only by their negativity.

Abdul described his upbringing as being “very regimented and structured” and said that at the time he didn’t understand his father’s “bizarre rules.” But he understands them now. He said when he left home at 17, “I felt like I could take on the world.”

“I give him credit for that.”

Raymond moved the boys to Carson, south of Compton, in 1982 to give them a fresh start in a new neighborhood. Abdul excelled academically in high school and was accepted into UC Irvine, where his passion for the sciences deepened. Gamble, who roomed with Harris while attending Cal State Fullerton, said he came home one day to discover that his childhood friend had drawn the periodic table on a wall in his bedroom as a study aid.

Harris brought the same intensity to everything he did, whether it was studying, dancing or playing video games. Gamble said his friend could come across as stern, even anti-social. But in more private moments, his “silly side” shone through.

“We have stories. We went to summer camp one year and laughed until midnight,” said Gamble, who is an athletic trainer and lives in Redondo Beach.

Harris stood out at Irvine, where African-Americans comprise only 2 percent of the student body. He joined the Black Students in Science Organization out of concern that minority students weren’t supported enough in their academic endeavors. However, he said he left the university “very frustrated, because as much as I felt like I was trying to make a difference, I could see that the problem was a little bigger than I was.”

UC Davis wasn’t much more diverse. But Harris said he accepted the school’s offer of admission into the medical program because the university had him interview with an enrolled black student. He felt a bond. Harris went on to complete his residency at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, where he narrowed his focus on becoming a general surgeon.

In 2001, Harris moved to Santa Rosa because his first wife liked it here. He joined the trauma team at Memorial in 2002 and also signed on with Northern California Medical Associates. Dr. Allen Cortez, another surgeon in the office and a former classmate of Harris’ at Davis, said Harris is “careful with his patients and careful about good outcomes.”

An Air Force reservist, Harris was sent to the Persian Gulf in 2003 during the run-up to the Iraq War. The hostilities ended before he could complete his mission, which was to help set up a mobile medical center.

In Santa Rosa, Harris specializes in minimally invasive surgery, with a focus on the treatment of hernias, gallbladder disease, diverticulitis and colon cancer. He sees patients at his Fourth Street office, which is adorned with gifts from those he has treated through Operation Access.

A letter from the daughter of one patient is pinned to a shelf.

“You are a part of our family Dr. Harris and you are very speacial! (sic),” the letter reads.

The procedures often are for relatively minor ailments. But they mean a great deal for people who have endured the pain.

“You can’t be a good laborer if you have a bad hernia,” said Harris, who was honored for his volunteer work at a Dec. 9 ceremony at Lagunitas Brewing Co. in Petaluma.

Harris can never anticipate what he will face at Memorial, where he works a 24-hour shift each week in the trauma center.

Gritsch, the trauma program manager, said that in life-and-death situations, Harris takes “good control of the room.”

“Sometimes you can hear a pin drop because his expectation is that he’s in charge and you need to be able to hear him,” she said.

Harris relays his experiences to students at Piner High School, where he’s a regular presenter in science classes. He also allows students to shadow him at Memorial.

“He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He had to work his way up, so he shares that experience with our students,” said Judy Barcelon, an instructor in the school’s Health Science and Biotechnology Pathway.

But for all of his achievements and recognitions, Harris still feels the occasional sting of a racial slight.

Many people mistakenly assume before meeting him that he’s Muslim, based on his first name. Gamble said some patients have expressed misgivings about Harris operating on them, out of concern he may harbor sympathy for America’s enemies abroad. In fact, Harris attends a Christian church in Santa Rosa.

Harris recounted standing outside Memorial one day when a woman behind the wheel of a sport utility vehicle stopped to ask if she should leave her keys with him. She thought he was a valet. Without a word, Harris looked down at his ID tag and up at the woman, who, realizing her mistake, became very apologetic. Another time, a man riding a bicycle hurled the N-word at Harris as he walked to Memorial for a trauma call.

Harris lets these incidents roll off him. His father always told him to look beyond what people say and to not judge in haste. But he said he understands the anger and frustration fueling protests nationwide over the killing of unarmed black men by police in Ferguson, Mo., and in New York City.

“Where I came from, it was always, you knew you were going to be treated differently,” he said. “You knew, no matter where you went, people were going to look at you differently and have preconceived notions about what you are capable of. And that was the thing you always had to battle against. You always had to be better than.”

Harris acknowledged feeling out of place his first couple years in Santa Rosa, which has a dearth of black professionals compared with other Bay Area communities. But he’s at peace now.

“It’s not so much where I go, so much as what I do once I get there,” he said.

He does worry that his daughters aren’t getting enough exposure to their African-American heritage living in Santa Rosa.

“They only get it in spurts,” he said.

What they don’t lack is their father’s adoration. Harris, who remarried in 2011 to April, a social worker at Memorial, said his greatest joy is coming home to five daughters who range in age from 21 months to 18 years. He went so far as to describe the “chaos” of his family life as “calming.”

For a man whose life and work have demanded precision and control, that’s saying something.

You can reach Staff Writer Derek Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @deadlinederek.