WHY I BUILT ELLA

We waited for the right time. Six million viewers were waiting.

Manhattan, April 2020

My brother in law was in the burn ICU of an Ivy League medical center. Multiple intensivists. Everything the system had to offer. He got COVID too early. Before proning. Before vaccines. Before effective pharmacotherapies. He died when we were still washing fruit and wiping everything down with disinfectant wipes.

A priest gave him last rites through a glass door.

The wards were empty. The city was under lockdown. Streets that never sleep had gone silent. Hospitals were not allowing partners in delivery rooms. No visitors anywhere. Not because the staff didn’t care. Because every visitor was a potential patient.

And yet the staff made an exception for my sister. Because they could not let him die alone. She held his hand. And I stood right outside the closed ICU doors, knowing that giving her a hug, just a hug, could put me in that same ICU. On a vent. On CVVD and pressors.

He was 46.

He died in the gap between what medicine knew and what it was still learning. We did not yet have the tools to save him. That was true in the best hospitals in the country.

At the same time, in safety net hospitals across New York, patients were dying without proper monitors or vents. Not because medicine didn’t know how to use them. Because they were not there. We were having desperate conversations about whether ventilators could be split between two patients simultaneously. They were not designed to do that. That is how dire it was.

Two different failures. One pandemic. Both of them mine to witness. And I have been speaking about it out loud ever since. Because silence, I learned that week, is its own kind of harm.

700 Followers

Three brothers named Ben, Brett, and Jordy Meiselas found me that spring. A fellow orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. Daniel Choi, made the introduction. The brothers were pivoting, as so many people were in 2020, but with a specific purpose. Ben Meiselas had spent his career advocating for social justice. He was Colin Kaepernick’s attorney. He understood what it meant to stand for something before the world caught up. They were driven by a belief that the truth needed a louder, independent voice. At that point they had about 700 followers on Twitter.

They interviewed me over Zoom about what I was watching happen inside hospitals. We later recorded an ad together encouraging people to believe science. To follow guidance from real scientists. To accept that COVID was a real disease.

I said what I needed to say.

People were banging pots and pans to show support for healthcare workers. I didn’t want the pots and pans. I wanted people to socially distance, wash their hands, and wear a mask.

And then I said the thing that could not be argued with.

You say COVID isn’t real. Why not ask my sister. Her husband isn’t here anymore.

Ben recognized the disruptive voice. He encouraged me to be more public with it.

He stayed in touch. We talked sometimes about medical issues in the news. MeidasTouch Network grew. Their following expanded from 700 into something nobody had predicted.

Ben kept pushing. Kept telling me I needed a voice on their channel. Kept seeing something I was not yet ready to step into.

I kept listening. And thinking small.

Chicago, March 2022

Four days of nonstop pace inside the largest gathering of people in my field. Sessions back to back. Colleagues everywhere. The particular exhaustion of being one of very few people in the room who look like you, moving through a space that was never designed with you in mind.

My co-host Sonya Sloan, M.D. and I ended up chatting in a room the way surgeons always end up in hotel rooms at conferences. Tired. Over-scheduled. Running on the specific fumes that come from loving the work and being worn down by the structures around it.

We started talking. About patients. About the system. About what medicine was getting wrong in public. About who had a platform and a medical degree and was done hedging.

At some point one of us said: someone should be doing this.

We looked at each other.

We knew who someone was.

We called Ben from that hotel room.

Ella

The name came first.

Ella means Her in Spanish. An Afro-Latina orthopaedic surgeon from Harlem naming a show after the Spanish word for Her is not a footnote. It is the whole argument in one word. Black and Brown Women Disruptors in Health Care and Beyond. Who the show was for. Who it was about. Said in two languages simultaneously because that is how this NYC, and the country frankly, actually sounds.

The founding line we wrote was: our existence is revolutionary.

We meant it then. We mean it now.

Bigger

Ben said yes. And then he said: bigger.

We were the only Black women contributors on MeidasTouch at the time. That was not a footnote. That was the point.

We reached out to Dr. Claudia Thomas, the first board-certified Black female orthopaedic surgeon in the United States. Her existence is revolutionary. She kicked the door open for every one of us who followed. She is an honorary board member of Black Women Orthopaedic Surgeons and has been a mentor to so many of us in this field. Sitting across from her not as a mentee but as her host on a platform we had built ourselves was something I did not have words for then. I am still finding them.

We spoke with Bree Newsome Bass. You may know her name. You may know the image. What you may not know is what she described to us about the day she climbed that flagpole in Charleston, South Carolina after nine Black people were murdered while praying in their church. She refused to let their caskets pass by a Confederate flag. She climbed the flag pole in partnership with a white male social justice activist named James. She described how the police planned to taser the pole to force her down. James held the pole. He knew they would not risk electrocuting a white man.

That is the kind of story Ella was built to tell.

And still. We hesitated.

We were juggling work and motherhood and service. AKA. BWOS. Our practices. Our patients. Our communities. We hesitated to be our full authentic selves in all parts of our lives. Ben kept encouraging us to reach higher. We were not always sure we deserved the room he kept insisting we belonged in.

We built slowly. With his encouragement and the platform MeidasTouch provided.

July 2024

Our sorority sister Kamala Harris was selected as the Democratic nominee for president. And we stopped waiting for the right moment, the right background, the right story.

We called Ben. He loved the idea of Sonya and me digesting the news as Ella:!Black and Brown Women Disruptors in Health Care and Beyond. Real time. No hedging. Two orthopaedic surgeons bearing witness to what was happening to this country. Processing it through everything we had spent our careers watching happen to our patients. MeidasTouch gave us Sydney as our producer and editor. We launched that July.

We have not stopped since. To date, with over 6 million views, our voices are heard every week on the MeidasTouch Network.

Why It Matters

The OR gave me precision. Twenty years of knowing exactly what the body costs when the system fails it.

But the OR has four walls.

What happens beyond those walls, the policy decisions, the ownership structures, the maternal mortality rates, the match data, the legislation that determines who gets care and who does not, does not stay outside the operating room. It shows up on the table. It shows up in who gets there and what shape they are in when they arrive.

Ella Disruptors was built because clinical authority belongs in the public conversation. Not filtered through a press release. Not summarized in a headline. From the orthopaedic surgeon’s mouth to the patient’s ear.

My brother in law deserved better than what the system gave him. So do the people still inside it.

Ben saw that in 2020. It took us until 2024 to fully claim it.

I write here every Thursday about medicine, power, and what the system costs the people it was never designed to serve.

Something bigger is coming for the people who want to go deeper.

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