Dr. Christian Galvez-Padilla: The Surgeon Who Defied the Odds
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Guatemalan Christian Galvez-Padilla closes the last suture. The thoracic surgery is over. As he leaves the operating room after removing the lung tumor and the affected tissue, he knows, with the certainty that more than twenty-five years of experience have given him, that a significant part of the outcome will now depend on how the patient responds and the care that accompanies his recovery.
A nurse at Berkshire Medical Center pushes the gurney where the patient, still asleep under the effects of anesthesia, rests toward the post-operative care unit. He faces several weeks of recovery; Dr. Galvez-Padilla has another surgery in the next few minutes, in which someone else will place their life in his hands.
But it wasn't always like that. There was a time when, despite being qualified to practice medicine, he had to prove that his knowledge and his accent could coexist in an operating room in the United States of America.
“Leaving your home country is like packing your entire life into a suitcase and leaving with the hope of finding something better. In my first two, three, or four years, there were several times when I did feel very marginalized […] because patients would tell me, 'I don't want you to treat me,' because they saw that I wasn't American. And that hurts a lot.”
He also faced skepticism in Guatemala, both before leaving and after returning to practice medicine . Almost everyone he asked for advice told him that getting into a surgical residency in the United States as a foreign doctor was too difficult, that trying would be a waste of time.
“Everything they told me was negative, negative, negative,” he recalls.
Only one of his mentors responded differently: “ The worst thing that can happen is that they tell you no. You have to keep trying, keep chipping away at the stone against the odds.”
And that's how two kitchen sponges ended up stuck to the wooden table in his room in Guatemala. With that ingenious contraption, Galvez rested his elbows and avoided skin irritation while he held his head and burned his eyelashes between the pages of medical books in English, a language he still didn't fully master.
Christian Galvez was born in 1972 in Guatemala City, the youngest of four brothers. He was ten years younger than his older brother, so he often jokes that he was "the surprise"
It was Guatemala scarred by the armed conflict of the civil war, which would last thirty-six years and ravage the country until 1996, filled with violence and political instability. A first memory: the 1976 earthquake. It was adding insult to injury for Guatemala. He was about four years old and slept with his family inside a car. For him, it was something of an adventure, as he was incapable of grasping the magnitude of the tragedy at that young age and the more than 23,000 lives lost that February 4th.
His father, of German descent, had lost his own father when he was two years old. The Keller family had arrived in Guatemala after World War II. Since he was raised by his mother, his father used Galvez as his first surname. At age 12, 10 years after loosing his father, he left the rural life of Santa Rosa and moved to the capital, where he lived in the back room of a grocery store and swept floors during the day.
Later he would buy his own store.
“Since he never had an education, he pushed us to go to university.”
Christian grew up observing in his family that mix of toughness, hard work, and gratitude. His parents were strict about chores, manners, and responsibilities. “ We would go outside after doing our chores to play ball, play hide-and-seek, play until it got dark and someone would shout, 'Let's have dinner!'”
His interest in medicine arose during a biology class, while looking at the dissected anatomy of a frog. Until then, he had worked packing customers' purchases in his father's shop, but he knew that commerce didn't inspire him. In the human body, he found something different: a complex territory that could be understood, intervened upon, and, sometimes, repaired.
Christian wanted to become a surgeon and after graduating in 1999 from Francisco Marroquín University he thought about Europe, but finally concluded that the United States could offer him better practical training and more direct exposure to patients.
To try, he had to pass the medical equivalency exams and compete with American students trained within a system he was only just beginning to understand. After that year of isolation, missing weddings and family celebrations, and wearing out his sponges with his elbows, he passed the exams, much to the surprise of all his detractors.
“I was like number four in the entire history of the country [to] come to the United States [to] do a surgical residency, specifically, which had always been very competitive. Nobody got in.”
But that was just the beginning of another, bigger challenge: discrimination. He applied to 25 surgical programs, and none granted him an interview. “It was the first time I felt discriminated against for being a foreigner,” he says. He imagined his file being relegated to the bottom of a pile as soon as someone read his name. “I felt like they would put my folder at the very bottom after seeing where I was from, and that what was inside didn’t matter.”
The rejection not only threatened her professional aspirations. It also touched on a deeper insecurity: the possibility that everything he had done was still insufficient because he had been born in another country . For the first time, he wondered if those who had advised him to give up were right.
Guided by that "yes, I can" feeling in his heart, he traveled to New York and stayed with a friend who was doing his medical residency. They shared a tiny space for about a month: his friend slept in the bed, and he slept on a sofa. From Manhattan, he began calling, asking questions, and looking for opportunities. He had realized that his grades wouldn't speak for themselves.
He needed to get someone to open the folder and look at its contents. That 's how he ended up in the Berkshires. His friend reminded him that Dr. Ricardo Cordón, a Guatemalan pulmonologist, worked in Pittsfield. Dr. Cordón, who had helped develop the intensive care unit at Berkshire Medical Center, spoke with the chief of surgery. Gálvez-Padilla then boarded a Peter Pan bus to a city he didn't know .
“I walked to the hotel with my suitcase; everything was beautiful and green, and the mountains. This area reminded me of the countryside where my father was from, the rural area. But the charm only lasted four months…” When winter arrived, he turned on the heating for the first time. “Things were very different back then. There were no rules about how many hours you could work. I would come in at 4:30 in the morning, it was dark; we would leave at nine at night, it was dark. I got depressed, like, seriously depressed.”
Amidst the internal battle, he also faced another external one due to his origins. “Even if a patient treats me badly, I will attend to them as best I can. Hopefully, that will change their way of thinking.”
Over time, his career path began to speak louder than her accent. He completed his residency in general surgery at Berkshire Medical Center in 2006. And two years later, he returned to Guatemala with the intention of sharing what he had learned.
“When I returned to Guatemala with the intention of helping, all I found were closed doors. Some surgeons interpreted my arrival as a threat and assumed that I wanted to compete with them for patients.”
Although he managed to implement techniques and improvements, he lost his position after approximately two years. He continued working for six months without pay because he believed in the institution, until the responsibility of supporting his three children made it impossible to prolong the sacrifice. The experience confronted him with a painful truth: he had fought to make a name for himself in the United States, and when he tried to return, he discovered that he also had to justify his presence in his own country.
Then he received a call from Pittsfield that couldn't have come at a better time: the hospital where he had trained was looking for a surgeon! What followed can't be summed up in a paragraph: years of operations, lives saved, families able to return home with a loved one, and a constant concern for the well-being of the Latino community, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, Galvez-Padilla continues to practice as a thoracic surgeon at Berkshire Medical Center.
Among all the patients he has treated, he particularly remembers a woman with a serious intestinal disease who received an intestine and pancreas transplant.
“She taught me how to keep going, how to keep fighting and never give up. She went through the worst of the worst and always had a smile. She could have been the most awful patient ever and no one would have blamed her for what she was going through, but it was the opposite. She taught me that no matter what life throws at you, you have to keep going with a smile, do your best, and not blame anyone.”
That teaching also contains its own history. After 26 years in the Berkshires, he worries that some Latinos still arrive at medical facilities feeling they must ask permission to be there. He worries about those who postpone an appointment because they fear not understanding the language, being judged by their accent, receiving inferior treatment, or discovering that no one is willing to listen to them.
“We are human, we are people, and we all have rights,” he affirms. “We have to get rid of the idea of ‘it’s better not to go,’ ‘it’s better not to speak,’ or ‘what will they say?’”
Dr. Christian Galvez-Padilla believes the Latino community must abandon the habit of shrinking away to avoid causing discomfort.
"Every immigrant, he maintains, carries knowledge, skills, and experiences that can contribute to transforming the place where they live. We all have something we’re good at and something we can use to help others.”
That young man, who bent over two sponges, couldn’t have known where so many hours spent with his books would lead. He didn’t know he would have to defend his place in two countries, that some patients would refuse his touch before allowing him to heal them, or that returning home could also become another form of exile.
"All I knew was that I had to keep going".
Decades later, he has become a renowned and respected surgeon. His story holds the same lesson he heard before leaving: even when doors remain closed, you must keep trying, keep moving forward, keep chipping away at the stone, even against the Odds.
