Houston nun, a doctor, dedicates life to helping


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HOUSTON (AP) — Sister Rosanne Popp wanted to get rid of one misconception right away: When she rides a motorcycle, it's never as a sidecar passenger.

To those who know the diminutive Catholic nun, a member of Houston's Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word and co-founder of the charitable motorcycle Nun Run, Popp's bold claim of two-wheeler prowess is right in character.

The Houston Chronicle (http://bit.ly/1yrls2s ) reports each fall, she dons helmet and macho riding gear to lead the Houston-to-Galveston excursion to raise funds for the CHRISTUS Foundation for Healthcare.

This year, the 50-mile trip brought the organization $96,000. Popp, 66, brings the same tenacity and professional athleticism to her day job as medical director of the foundation's southeast Houston St. Mary's Clinic, a family medicine practice serving Houston's uninsured.

With the help of two part-time assistants, Popp, who became a doctor after a long nursing career, handles as many as 10,000 cases annually.

Described on the CHRISTUS Foundation's website as a woman with "fire in her eye" — an assertion that bemused Popp — the nun is known for compassion wedded to practicality. She is plain-spoken; her humor, dry. Of her early years she remarked: "I had two parents and two siblings."

Popp was born into a Catholic Czech-German household in the Colorado County rice farming hamlet of Nada.

"That's Czech for 'friendship,'?" Popp clarified, "not Spanish for 'nothing.'?"

When she was 3, her father was electrocuted in a household accident. Popp brushed aside questions about her mother's plight. "That's way complicated," she said. "There were three of us. She was a single mom for most of her life."

As a teen, Popp attended a Catholic boarding school.

"It was like one great bolt of lightning," she said. "In my heart of hearts . I knew this was where I belonged."

On graduating, Popp joined a convent, and, when it came time to choose a profession, picked nursing. Starting as a licensed vocational nurse, she soon was back in school. Over the next few years the nun obtained degrees qualifying her as a registered nurse, nurse practitioner and, finally, medical doctor.

She has practiced family medicine for 19 years.

From the beginning, Popp said, she was drawn to serving the poor.

Popp spent two years working with colonia residents on the Texas-Mexican border.

Time spent in Kenya, where she watched patients die of treatable illnesses because of lack of medicine and equipment, left her shaken. "I would dream at night of having my hands tied behind my back," she said.

In the mid-1990s, Popp joined the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, taking up duties at a CHRISTUS Foundation clinic in southwest Houston. In August 2011, she became medical director at the new St. Mary's Clinic in a strip center on South Wayside.

Foundation president Les Cave said the clinic fit well in his organization's mission to spread Christian ministry through social outreach.

"We have a liberal interpretation of what health means," Cave said, noting that the organization addresses issues ranging from traditional medical care to literacy, homelessness and substance abuse. The charity operates with an annual budget of almost $5 million.

"St. Mary's is at the heart of what we're doing," he said.

Based on 2010 population figures, the Texas Medical Association estimates that almost 28 percent of Harris County residents lack medical insurance. Among Hispanics, a Houston Health and Human Services Department report found, the percentage rises to 53 percent.

"What we have here," Popp said, "are people who want to take care of themselves, but they often must decide whether to use their money for rent, to feed their children or for health care."

Many of Popp's patients have few medical alternatives. Many are immigrants, most are poor and some illiterate. Patients who are in the United States legally still may not be able to obtain medical care elsewhere because they lack proof of income or a permanent residence, she said.

St. Mary's work, much of it dealing with basic health care such as controlling diabetes, has a clear impact on patients' lives, Popp said. A 2010 city health department report placed diabetes among Harris County Hispanics at 11 percent.

With routine medical care, she said, many medical complications requiring expensive high-tech procedures can be avoided.

Still, there are cases that underscore the urgency of the clinic's mission.

Last year, when her work was honored by the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, Popp shared the story of a woman who arrived at the clinic with a baseball-sized growth on her head.

Unable to afford an MRI at a local hospital emergency room, the woman told Popp she had gone untreated for a year. By the time she came to St. Mary's, the woman's face was swollen and she was feverish.

She also suffered from untreated diabetes, Popp determined.

With the clinic's help, the patient gained admission to a local Catholic hospital, where she steadily improved.

Then a test revealed that the woman's mass was a rare cancer usually found in children.

Popp and her colleagues struggled to find advanced treatment for the woman. At last, Popp said, she was admitted to a Houston cancer center, where she received chemotherapy, surgery and radiation treatments.

Doctors, Popp said, believe the woman's prognosis is good.

"Her patients," said Cave, "just make a story that goes to anybody's heart. . We wish we could have 10 more Sister Rosannes."

Popp is compassionate, but her demeanor can be jarringly direct.

She admitted advising patients that if they don't care about their health, neither does she. But beneath the crusty exterior is a nun with a heart of gold.

Besides occasionally riding motorcycles — although always as a backseat passenger — she does needlework, gardens, bakes cookies and walks the convent's canine, Buddy, a "generic dog with a generic name." Popp described herself and the others in her order as "stereotypical nuns without the stereotypes."

Clinic intern Valerie Acuna, 17, a senior at Cristo Rey Jesuit College Preparatory School, said she initially found Popp intimidating.

"When she started seeing I had an interest in medicine, we opened up more," said Acuna, "Now, she's more than a doctor, she's like a mom to me here at work."

Acuna said she hopes to become a registered nurse working with the poor.

"I do have a dream of becoming a doctor," she added. "And, because of Dr. Popp, I think that it's possible."

___

Information from: Houston Chronicle, http://www.houstonchronicle.com

This is an AP Member Exchange shared by the Houston Chronicle

Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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