Melissa (Pierre) DeChellis ’02 needed an ambulance.
Instead, she was bouncing around in the back of a pickup truck, on a winding mountain road on the Caribbean island of Dominica. That morning, she had woken up with pain and swelling in her right leg and, instead of going to her classes at Ross University School of Medicine as planned, she needed immediate medical attention. It turned out to be a blood clot, in the same leg that had endured a congenital clubfoot throughout her childhood and 15 reconstructive surgeries throughout her late teens and 20s.
“It was a great American medical school, but you [still] don’t want to become sick when you’re on a remote island,” DeChellis says. “They took me to an adobe hut of a hospital, where I became infected with parasites. They needed to MedFlight me to Puerto Rico.”
In Puerto Rico, DeChellis used the medical Spanish she learned during an immersion and medical service trip to Guatemala years before, advocating for her care in her second language. Meanwhile, she was trying to get in touch with a vascular surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston for whom she had worked in a research job. With the surgeon’s help, DeChellis was able to arrange a MedFlight home to Boston, so doctors at Brigham and Women’s could treat her leg.
“I was not sure I would make it off either of the islands,” DeChellis says, thinking back on the November 2007 ordeal. “At first, they tried multiple procedures to save the leg, but several years later in late 2012, my leg was completely compromised, and I had a really difficult decision to make: salvage what was left of my leg or amputate it. I was facing several surgeries and probably a lifetime of intolerable, chronic pain. Having been in chronic pain before, from all the reconstructive surgeries and years of immobility that followed, it was a difficult decision, but probably one of the clearest and best decisions of my life. Not many people have the opportunity to hit a reset button — and making the decision to electively amputate my leg was my reset button.”