Aspire to Inspire

Just as Dr. Damirez Fossett ’81 sat down for Christmas dinner with his family, his pager went off. A college student had been the middle seat passenger in an Uber that collided with another car, sending her flying between the front two seats. Her head had hit both the steering wheel and the gear shift, resulting in bilateral skull fractures and epidural hematomas, or bleeds between the skull and the outer layer of the brain. She was brought into the emergency room at Howard University Hospital, comatose and in critical condition. 

Damirez, Chief of Neurosurgery at Howard, jumped up from the dinner table and sped into D.C. They rushed the patient to the operating room and performed bilateral procedures. “The young lady was back at her graduate school the day after New Years doing just fine,” Damirez says, smiling. 

The very next Christmas, a woman slipped on slick metal steps, hitting her head hard on the way down. “She had a nasty skull fracture and a bad brain bleed,” Damirez recalls. “They called me, and I told them, ‘Take her straight to the operating room. I’ll be there in 20 minutes.’ I walked in and began examining her, and I thought to myself, she’s not going to make it. But we’re here in the operating room and it’s Christmas Eve. Let’s just do what we do.” Now, two years later, the woman is completely healthy with no cognitive deficits. She brings Damirez and his team cookies on Christmas Eve. 

“There are stories like that from time to time,” he says. “We call them little miracles, in which we play a role as God’s instruments. And those are the things that you live for because they make it worth doing what you do. They make it worth the time that you spend training to do it. You think about all the sleepless nights in residency and missing baby showers and birthdays and weddings, and sometimes people ask, ‘Was it worth it?’ Well, you just need to have one case like that in a career, and then it’s worth it. And as neurosurgeons, we’re fortunate because we get to impact people’s lives in a positive way, and it’ll happen more than once in a career.” 

Damirez graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in biology and attended medical school at Johns Hopkins University. He matched into a neurosurgical residency at George Washington University. After completing the seven-year program, he spent a few years on faculty at GW before transitioning to private practice for nearly a decade. He has been Chief of Neurosurgery at Howard now for 15 years, but his interest in the field began much earlier than any of his formal training. 

When he was a student at Mount Saint Joseph, Damirez had an opportunity to work in the biophysics laboratory at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. They were exploring the neuromuscular junction and how different drugs and medications altered the way action potential stimulated muscles. “I found the central nervous system to be extremely fascinating, particularly brain disorders. A lot of people in my family had passed away from bleeds in the brain related to blood pressure or to ruptured aneurysms,” he says. “So, that experience was right up my alley with my interest in how nerves work. I learned a lot in that laboratory.” 

Damirez has certainly learned innumerable skills, techniques, and lessons throughout his career, but the most important, he says, is to “never give up.” Faithfully, he carries out that directive as often as the challenge arises. His very last case at GW was a young man with a ruptured aneurysm. His prognosis was grave and Damirez expressed the severity of his condition to the patient’s fiancée, explaining that they wouldn’t ordinarily offer surgical intervention under such circumstances. She asked him to try anyway. Damirez took the man to surgery and successfully clipped his aneurysm. 

“It was my last case, so I never knew what happened to him,” Damirez says. “I was in private practice about eight or nine years down the road, and I saw this name show up on my schedule that looked familiar. The day came for the visit. I walk in, and it’s that patient. He goes, ‘Finally, I get to meet you.’ And he was completely fine. He’d even started his own business.” 

One of Damirez’s favorite parts of his job is being able to pass down those lessons and skills he’s learned over the years to his students. His love for teaching is what drew him back to an academic institution after his stint in private practice. At Howard, a historically Black university, he also serves as an example for what his students can achieve. 

“Neurosurgery has always been underrepresented in terms of African Americans as attending neurosurgeons,” he explains. “It hasn’t been a specialty that African Americans have gravitated to for a lot of reasons, but I found myself wanting to mentor students who are interested in doing it.” 

Howard does not have a neurosurgery residency program, which can make it challenging breaking into the field. But Damirez wants his students to know that it’s not impossible. “I want to help them navigate the pathways to success to be able to get into neurosurgery,” he says. “We need someone to champion their efforts and their cause. It’s hard to continue doing the same thing over and over again unless you can see the benefits at the end of the day. I represent one of the benefits. I traveled the same path and here I am, 30 years later, practicing neurosurgery.” 

At the heart of his dedication to advancing neurosurgery education and mentorship is Damirez’s motto: “Aspire to inspire.” Named 2023 Congress of Neurological Surgeons Educator of the Year, he co-founded the Howard-Mayo Clinic Neurosurgery Student Journal Club and proudly sponsors Howard’s American Association of Neurological Surgeons chapter and its annual neuroscience symposium. Additionally, the Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation’s Damirez T. Fossett Honor Your Mentor Fund supports students at HBCU medical schools, providing critical resources for neurosurgery education, residency applications, and the interview process — opening doors for the next generation of leaders in the field.