Urban Legend
While she may never be famous, at least in one community Dr. Gloria Wilderbrathwaite is a household name.
Thirty-six-year-old Wilderbrathwaite is the medical director of the Washington, D.C., Children's Health Project.
She says she decided she wanted to become a doctor because "I wanted to help somebody, you know, just one person."
"And that would have been enough," she adds.
She helps almost 1,700 patients a year, and all of them through house calls. Correspondent Peter Van Sant reports.
Five days a week, Dr. Wilderbrathwaite and her team bring their mobile pediatric clinic to Anacostia, one of the most impoverished communities in the country and just a stone's throw from the Capitol. Arriving in a bright blue 40-foot mobile health care unit, she provides continuity pediatric care for children living in a community where the infant mortality rate and occurrences of teen pregnancy are more than twice the national average.
"The need is enormous, in some ways it's overwhelming," she says. "Some days it feels like we're drowning."
In some cases, medical care may even be a matter of life and death. For 10-year-old Tempest Cook who suffers from severe asthma, Dr. Wilderbrathwaite may be her only hope.
Children across the country will die because they didn't get proper health care, she says.
"I grew up in a place called Bed-Sty, Do or Die," she says, laughing, "in Brooklyn, N.Y."
"It's a rough place but to me...it's home," Wilderbrathwaite says.
Bedford Stuyvesent, like Anocostia, was a tough place to be a child.
Gloria was first thought to be autistic. She used to rock back and forth. Her teachers would tie her down. Her mother sprung to her defense, explaining she comes from a family of rockers.
As a kid, she depended on a public clinic for medical care.
"We were on welfare, public assistance...and Medicaid," she explains.
"It smelled of urine and sometimes vomit," she recalls. "And I remember having to line up with all the other little kids in the room,...everybody naked all at the same time and that was, for me, very traumatic."
"I remember things like that and just thinking that that's not right," she says.
That memory fueled her motivation to eventually become a doctor.
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She was, in fact, a gifted student. She attended the New York City public school system and ended up with a scholarship to Howard University where she majored in microbiology and chemistry.
She then got her master's degree in genetics and continued on to medical school at Georgetown; she was the first from her family to ever attend college.
While at Georgetown, she heard about the Children's Health Fund starting a mobile health clinic in Washington, D.C., and demanded that she be placed in that program for her residency.
"Even when she was a kid, she was always trying to do something for somebody," says her mother Theresa Wilder, who showed her what it took to raise children in the inner city. Wilder, raised three children in Bed-Sty, Brooklyn, while holding down two full-time jobs.
Her mother grew up in a foster home. "I have a soft spot every time I walk by here 'cause I had beautiful foster parents," Wilder says.
"Sometimes in life you're asked to make certain choices and...like Ma says, 'You can do what's right or you can do what's easy' and I've always seen her do what's right." says Wilderbrathwaite.
"I'm busting with pride," says her proud mother Wilder.
"She's a fantastic doctor but she's an extraordinary human being," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, the co-founder of the Children's Health Fund, which helps operate 17 mobile clinics around the country, including Dr. Wilderbrathwaite's.
"Dr. Gloria is contributing in ways that very few physicians, will have an opportunity to do in their lifetime," he adds.
"She has a level of dedication to her work and compassion for her patients that is absolutely without parallel," he declares.
Now, with a family of her own (she married her high school sweetheart). Wilderbrathwaite knows just how important a little loving care can be - for her own children and the hundreds more who visit the van every year. She has three children, 13, 7, and 4, and is about to move into her first house. (Her husband, Carlos, is a Fairfax County, Va., police officer specializing in community police and works out of a middle school.)
Says Redlener: "She's a role model for all of us, younger and older than she is, because she says, 'I am accomplishing in my life, with my skills, the betterment of the lives of others.'"
"Maybe if they just remember that there was a doctor once who gave them a hug and a kiss on the cheek," she says, "maybe that'll have an effect in the future and maybe it won't but it sure makes me happy today," he says, laughing.