Part doctor, part artist

September 9, 2024 - By Kathryn Sill
 

Adela Wu, MD, finishes her shift and strolls down the corridor of the concrete hospital floors in her surgical clogs and blue scrubs. From the outside, she appears as any other physician, but Wu is multi-faceted.

Wu is in her final year of neurosurgery residency at Stanford, but outside of work she wears many hats. She is also a writer, artist, mother, daughter, sister, and wife.

The SoCal native first became interested in the medical field when her father was diagnosed with a high-grade brain tumor, known as atypical meningioma, when she was in seventh grade. He would spend the next 17 years undergoing eight brain surgeries, three courses of radiation, and enrolling in multiple clinical trials and experimental chemotherapies, before he passed.

“I saw my mom go through a lot those 17 years as his primary caregiver,” Wu said. “His passing had a profound impact on my entire family, and for me it not only served as a catalyst for me to go into medicine, but to specifically specialize in neurosurgery.”

Wu detailed her family’s story in a 2023 issue of Stanford Medicine magazine, receiving national recognition with a with a CASE Circle of Excellence Gold Award.

Her immediate family all pursued careers in the healthcare field. Her father was a pharmacist, her mother was a chiropractor, and her younger sister is an orthopedic surgery resident at UCLA.

But medicine was not Wu’s only love.

“I had an interest in humanities from a young age,” Wu said. “I loved reading books and writing was a natural extension of that.”

Her mother bought her journals, and since age six, she had been jotting down her thoughts in diaries. Aware of Wu’s affinity for writing, her second grade teacher submitted one of Wu’s assignments based on the well-known children’s book, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” to the author, Judith Viorst.

His passing had a profound impact on my entire family, and for me it not only served as a catalyst for me to go into medicine, but to specifically specialize in neurosurgery.

In exchange, Wu received a handwritten postcard from Viorst with the message,  “Keep on writing.” Wu smiles as she retells the story.

Her writing interest at a young age carried into her undergraduate studies at Brown University, graduating magna cum laude in English and Neuroscience. The Open Curriculum at Brown allowed Wu to customize her majors, focusing her English track on creative non-fiction.

As Wu’s workload with medical school and residency picked up in the years ahead, she still managed to prioritize writing through writing for Stanford Medicine’s SCOPE blog and Intima Journal.

She wrote for NPR through the American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Fellowship, where she was paired with the Global Health desk. She also completed a second writing fellowship for ABC News. Then, during 2021-2022, she consulted for Grey's Anatomy.

“The former program director at Stanford Neurosurgery, Dr. Gerald Grant, sent me the application,” Wu said. “I was added to the consulting team of medically trained professionals who work with the writing team to ensure storyline accuracy, in terms of anatomy and equipment positioning. It just so happened that season, they had a patient receiving deep brain stimulation featured as a recurring character.”

Now, through Stanford’s Medical Humanities & the Arts Program (MedMuse), Wu is working on a memoir honoring her late father, with mentorship from Laurel Braitman, PhD, the director for writing and storytelling at MedMuse.

“MedMuse provides a home for medical professionals to delve into passions in the arts and humanities,” Wu said. “I’m grateful to work in a place with like-minded individuals who inspire me to grow in my creative side.”

Outside of writing, Wu also boasts an impressive talent in art, with her illustrations  appearing on the covers of a handful of notable scientific journals, including “World Neurosurgery” and “Neurology”, and featured at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons Annual Meeting.

Wu began doodling as a child and took some formal drawing classes through elementary and middle school. She often draws portraits as gifts for family, friends, attendings, and mentors using pen, pencil, charcoal, or watercolor. Recently, she also began venturing into digital art creation.

“Literature, writing, and art are an expressive outlet and a way for me to engage my brain, in something that isn’t science or medicine related,” Wu said.
 

With a packed schedule juggling work, family, and raising a two-year-old it can be hard for Wu to find time for this outlet, so she has started carrying around a Kindle to read non-work-related books in between cases occasionally, as it is easier to squeeze in reading over creating.

“Sometimes I think I may have too many hobbies, not enough time,” Wu said. “But, I tell medical students who come to me for guidance that it's possible to explore different facets of interests. Often, people express to me that they think of neurosurgery as an all-consuming thing, but I find addressing my other interests as well actually helps me to be a more well-rounded physician.”

Wu will complete her residency in mid-June and after that will consider what next career steps to take, but until then she is set on continuing her outside hobbies and setting an example for her daughter.

“As a mother, I want to show my daughter how to be a compassionate and well-rounded person and to develop her own interests,” Wu said. “I also had the support of encouraging parents and women mentors in my field to look up to. Each of the female physicians who mentored me set an example for how to deeply care for patients and their own families, and I want to embody that as well.”

Every September, Stanford Medicine celebrates Women in Medicine month. During this month the Department of Neurosurgery will feature stories and accomplishments of various women faculty and trainees across the department both on our department website and social channels, celebrating their contribution to patient care, research, and education.