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My name is Everett Bonner. I’m a breast surgeon. And I didn’t always want to be a breast surgeon or actually I should say, I don’t know if I wanted be a breast surgeon or a surgeon altogether. At first, when I was an undergraduate, I thought I was going into politics. I was a political science major, but while I was in school, I wanted to pay for school. So I joined the Louisiana National Guard, became an army medic. That’s where I got my first taste of medicine and care for people and becoming a healer. That was the catalyst for me going, “You know what? Maybe I should start thinking about going into medicine.” So I started changing my major. I went into a biology major. And while I was in school, I was contemplating, where am I going to go to this primary care? My initial thought was OBGYN. It was with women’s health, but I really liked the surgery part of the OBGYN practice. So someone told me if you really like that, just go into surgery and let that guide you. So that’s what I did. I did a general surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering after finishing LSU Medical School in New Orleans. It was a five-year program. It was a level one trauma center, very, very trauma heavy. But while I was there, I had a patient. Breast cancer. She was from France and she was there during World War II and she was watching her family be killed in the streets. And this was her second breast cancer. And it was a story that she told me how she fought the European war at that time. And they got diagnosed with her second breast cancer. And there was this story and the fight in her, I just got so overwhelmed and I started gravitating myself towards breast cancer. I did an externship at MD Anderson and that’s where I fell in love. I met some professors there and some of the top people in the breast cancer world.
After that, I was still in the national guard. I got deployed to Iraq as a trauma surgeon, very awkward, a breast surgeon doing trauma in Iraq, but I did it and served my time. And I finished 25 years in the army and finished as a Lieutenant Colonel, but I’ve dedicated my practice and my life to breast surgery and women’s health. And it’s been beneficial to me, it’s been beneficial to my family. I just love it. I love my patients. When patients come into my office, I look at them and it depends on what age they are. If they’re an older patient, I treat them like my mother, if they’re much older, it’s like my grandmother. If they’re my age, I treat them like my wife. And if they’re younger, I treat them like my daughter. And that’s how I approach every single patient in my practice, because I think they need that personal touch. And with breast cancer and the diagnosis of breast cancer, they need someone to let them know it’s going to be okay.
