Front and Center: Dr. Keisha Bell
Published on Monday, February 17, 2025
By: Gary Pettus, gpettus@umc.edu
Photos By: Melanie Thortis/ UMMC Communications
Editor's Note: A version of this story first appeared in the winter 2024 issue of Mississippi Medicine.
On commencement day, her family was there with bells on. Everyone wore T-shirts: “I’m with the doctor!”
Inside the Mississippi Coliseum, as Dr. Keisha Bell (’12) walked across the stage to shake hands with her diploma, her loved ones used their hands to clang cowbells – a tribute to her name and a ringing endorsement.
Missing, though, was the person she calls “my heart” – her paternal grandmother.
Her “granny” was with her, though, in a way – etched in her thoughts and on her arm in the ink that curved in the form of butterfly wings.
To this day, the image reminds Bell of those times when, as she puts it, “I fought my way out of the darkness and flew toward the light of my dream.”
Her grandmother believed in the dream.
Doubt and the debut
Delivering babies and taking care of women – this is what she had dreamed about from age 13.
“I'm a REAL, LIVE DOCTOR!,” she wrote in a blog, chronicling her first day of residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center a dozen years ago.
When her next four years of OB-GYN training were done, she had received the Best Resident Teacher Award and earned the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine Award for Excellence in Obstetrics.
Now an assistant professor of OB-GYN and a hospitalist at UMMC, Bell would also be honored with the Council on Resident Education in Obstetrics and Gynecology National Faculty Award for Excellence. Dr. Shiannea Gathers, an OB-GYN resident at UMMC, knows why.
“Dr. Bell wants me to try for as long as I can to figure out my own way,” Gathers said. “I love that she gives you the opportunity to do what she calls ‘finding beauty in the struggle.’”
Bell’s struggle with self-doubt was keenest during her failed attempts to get into medical school and, later, during her residency, when it seemed impossible to become a good doctor and remain a good mom.
Death and dreaming
Although she didn’t live a rich life in terms of money, she had hit the jackpot with her family, including aunts and uncles.
As with the dream of many future physicians, it began with death of some of those loved ones. Kidney failure and cancer.
“I wanted to investigate what happened and find out if I could have healed them,” Bell said. She was 6 at the time.
When she was 13, the blurred image of a dream sharpened when she saw an Oprah episode about a surgeon in Ethiopia caring for women and girls with obstetric fistula, an internal injury caused by prolonged, obstructed labor.
“I saw these other little girls trying to have babies their bodies weren’t made for,” Bell said. She wanted to find out the name of the surgeon’s specialty. Ultimately, urogynecology wasn’t for Bell, but obstetrics-gynecology was.
As a high school student growing up in Jackson, Bell had “rocked babies in the NICU.” Their small bodies also had large influence on her decision to take care of others like them, and, especially, their mothers.
At that time, her own mother, Leesha Bell, was walking several miles to work every day battling to create a better life for her family. “We were eating eggs, rice and canned food,” Keisha Bell said. “She needed someone with stability to take care of me until she got back on her feet.”
That someone was the mother of Harvey Gales, Bell’s father. Bell stayed with Katherine Gales from age 4 through her fourth-grade year, seesawing between grand-mom and mom until Leesha Bell moved to Las Vegas for work. By then, Bell had a brother, Chris.
While in high school, she didn’t need to study. She won a full scholarship to Tougaloo College in Jackson but lost it when her lack of study skills caught up with her. Loans got her through the remainder of college and, she hoped, to the threshold of medical school. They didn’t.
A college department head even told her she wasn’t ready for medical school.
Some 6½ years later, Bell stood on the stage of Thalia Mara Hall in Jackson. With her was her daughter, Jai, who held her hand, a flesh-and-blood reminder of why her mom, as she announced her residency match, was going to be a doctor after all.
Deferment and destiny
Jai had been born to someone close to Bell, someone who needed help. Jai was three days old when she came to Bell, and now, 17 years later, they are still together.
“The summer Jai came to live with me, I applied to medical school again, after being rejected twice,” Bell said. It would be her last try. In December, while working as a bank teller, she opened the email announcing her acceptance.
Years later, she realized why it was so long in coming: “God’s plan was for me to raise Jai, but if I already had been in the throes of medical school, I may not have felt I could do it.
“Part of my reason for trying again was that I wanted Jai to know that you should not give up on your dream.”
Jai went through medical school with her, studying or watching movies on her iPad in the hospital and sleeping sometimes on a mat on the Classroom Wing floor.
Shortly before her residency began, Bell bought her a Jai-sized long white coat with her name on it.
Residency was even harder. In order to make rounds, Bell had to get Jai up at 4 in the morning sometimes. She had to miss some of Jai’s school events. Bell hoped that Jai would find that her mom’s hard work and the sacrifices they both made would be worth it one day.
Certainly, Bell’s patients are glad she prevailed. One day last year, she took over a post-partum patient who was hemorrhaging. She figured out the cause: a cervical laceration; the patient needed surgery to stop the bleeding, and that’s what happened.
“Later,” Bell said, “she asked if I could deliver her next baby because she said she felt safe with me.”
Bell’s, and Jai’s, sacrifices have also benefitted residents and students.
“I wasn’t sure what [specialty] I was going to pursue until Dr. Bell set me up to follow an OB-GYN oncologist,” said fourth-year medical student Jayla Mondy, whom Bell mentored.
“And it was, ‘oh, my goodness, this is what I really like.’
“Her positivity and light have given me the confidence I needed. She’s always encouraging me to say, ‘I’m going to be a great doctor. I’m going to be a great OB-GYN.’”
Third-year resident Dr. Brittany Mitchell (’22) didn’t know she wanted to be an OB-GYN until, as a student, she met Bell.
“Dr. Bell is brilliant, a great teacher,” Mitchell said. “All the residents trust her decisions, and we’re looking forward to the day we’re on staff and she’s working with us.”
Difficulties and devotions
She is no longer a single mom, no longer a mother of one. A blind date with Larry Catchings Jr. led to marriage in 2017. They have a son, Liam, age 5.
Jai wants to be a veterinarian. Perhaps she’ll be getting another white coat.
Her mom’s struggles are ended or, at least, different. Bell worries about the women of Mississippi, the lack of access to care.
But she is also at peace because of the work she does, and proud of having found the will to push past the doubts that assailed her and find her place in the world. She recently realized another dream of hers, one she’d had since starting medical school: a Maternal-Fetal Medicine Fellowship.
“Being an OB-GYN gives me the opportunity to offer patients a hand to hold,” she said, “a voice of compassion and empathy when some of them may be going through the most difficult time of their lives.”
Her metamorphosis would have been sweeter if her granny had seen it.
Years earlier, Katherine Gales, ill and hospitalized, became “livid,” Bell said, when she learned that someone had almost killed her granddaughter’s dream by telling her she wasn’t ready.
“She told me that whatever I put my mind to, I could do it,” Bell said. Three years after her grandmother died, Bell got into medical school.
Still, she knows. Bell is sure. The first time she visited her after the funeral, Bell said, a butterfly settled on the flowers around her grave. “And it stayed there until I left.”