As a student Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei was torn between pursuing a career in medicine and a career in engineering. He was drawn to medicine because of the Ghanaian doctor who cured him of a severe gastric illness that could have taken his life, but engineering was intriguing, too. Ultimately, his first love, medicine, won out.

"Surgery appealed to me because I wanted to do more than just push drugs," Boachie says. "Surgery also appealed to me because it was close to engineering."

But the decision to specialize in spine surgery came about somewhat fortuitously, during an internship at St. Vincent's Hospital. His mentor asked what he was doing for his final project. Boachie asked, "What hasn't been done?"

Turns out no research had been done on the anatomical dissection of spines since 1930. For his final intern project, Boachie went to the morgue and dissected 200 spines from head to toe.

"From there, it was a no-brainer to pursue spine surgery," Boachie says. To date, he has performed thousands of spine surgeries and he's seen cases even more severe than Juma's.

Recently, Boachie returned from one of his many trips to Ghana with his nonprofit Foundation of Orthopaedics and Complex Spine (FOCOS), which provides spine and orthopaedic care for underserved communities in Ghana and West Africa. In two weeks, he and 35 volunteers operated on 30 spines and performed 18 joint replacements.

"These people thought there was no hope and when someone comes from nowhere to help, they believe there must be a God or angels," Boachie says of the work he and volunteers are able to do.

"My hope is to build an orthopaedic hospital in West Africa to train professionals, so that I can leave a permanent legacy."

To learn more about FOCOS, visit www.orthofocos.org. (By clicking on this link, you will be leaving discovery.com.)