Sherry Apple, MD, an Active Provisional AANS member since 1994, died suddenly in July due to injuries suffered in a boating accident. A private practice neurosurgeon in Charleston, W. Va., she was the President of Women in Neurosurgery. The following story is excerpted and reprinted with permission from the Charleston Daily Mail.
Dr. Sherry Apple, a pioneering Charleston neurosurgeon who handed out her trademark apple bandages, has been killed in a boating accident in Canada.
“It’s a deep loss for our organization and for her patients,” said Dr. Glenn Crotty, chief operating officer of Charleston Area Medical Center.
Apple reportedly was boating in a skiff with her husband in the Thousand Islands area near Upstate New York either in the late hours Wednesday or early Thursday. The skiff caught a wave, ejected Apple and then crashed into her.
One of only four brain surgeons in the Kanawha Valley and the only female neurosurgeon in the state, the 49-year-old Apple was enamored with new and creative surgical procedures that would reduce pain and heal. She attended medical school at Tennessee State University, practiced in Arizona and Louisiana and was recruited to West Virginia three years ago by Dr. Constantino Amores, a colleague at Neurological Associates. Apple once told a newspaper reporter if the surgery was complicated, she was going to do it. In 1999, she debuted stereotactic radiosurgery in the area. In February of this year, Apple performed the first balloon vertebroplasty in the area. During that procedure, she inflated a balloon inside a spinal fracture caused by osteoporosis and injected bone cement to shore up the spine.