Dr. April L. Spencer didn’t start out planning a career in breast cancer surgery.
In her twenties, she was a general-trauma surgeon in Atlanta at the height of the crack epidemic and the drug war, working in one of the busiest Level I trauma centers in the Southeast. It was, as she recalls, the “best of times and the worst of times”—the city was preparing for the Olympics, but the streets were violent and unsettled. Many of the young patients she treated, she would only see again if they were stabbed or shot the following summer. For someone who values continuity of care and treating the whole person, that reality left a mark.
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