Physician Associates, Orlando Health
LAKE MARY - When it comes to determination, Lori Grant comes by it honestly.
Growing up on a farm in rural southwest Georgia, Grant’s parents instilled accountability and independence at a very young age. Her mother Ann Addison is a Physician’s Assistance and Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner who taught nursing, became director of the local health department, earned a PhD in healthcare management, became CEO of the nonprofit healthcare organization that serves underinsured and indigent patients and raised two children.
Grant said her earliest memories of medicine were accompanying mom to the local doctor’s office on Saturdays. “I ‘worked’ for her,” said Grant, “answering phones, holding lights, any little thing a kid could do.” By age 10, she already knew she wanted to be a physician.
Grant said she’s always been “pretty proud of my mom” and how determined she was to continue her education and service to the public’s health. Yet, her mother never lobbied her to study medicine. “Actually she tried to talk me out of medicine. She tried to talk me into going into law … because she said I would argue with a wall,” said Grant, who was determined, like her mother, to blaze her own trail to success and service.
At the same time, Grant’s father, Toby Addison, was using his skills as a farmer in Colquitt, Ga., to teach his daughter a work ethic that has endured. “We grew peanuts and soybeans. … I loved peanut harvest season. My job (with mom) was to haul the trailers full of peanuts to the peanut mill, where they were dried, sold and shipped,” she said.
The Addisons raised pigs, too, and showing her pigs in competitions at county fairs taught Grant lifelong lessons about hard work and appreciating the value of a dollar, she said. “We saved our money and dad made us reinvest it” in their barnyard enterprises, Grant said. She was determined to win more blue ribbons.
All the while, Grant honed her skills as an athlete. She started playing softball when she was 3 years old and evolved into a second baseman who batted well enough to earn a scholarship to play at Darton State College in Albany. But Grant turned it down so she could concentrate on using her merit scholarship to concentrate on academics at Georgia Southwestern State University. “My brother (Benji), who played college baseball, told me I would regret not taking the softball scholarship,” she said. But, once again, Grant was determined to do it her way.
After earning her degree in biology she took off a year “to decide what I wanted to do. … I had worked with some podiatrists in Tallahassee and southwest Georgia and really kind of fell in love with the idea of being an expert in one field,” she said. “I only have 26 bones to deal with in the feet and ankles. … I always knew I wanted to do something with sports medicine or orthopedics, and (podiatry) kind of fit both. … I could do surgery, treat sports injuries, save limbs and change people’s lives.”
So, Grant headed to the New York College of Podiatric Medicine. “I was told I would never make it and I would be back in Georgia within a year,” she recalled. That probably was the wrong thing to say to a person who specializes in determination, because four years later she was at Florida Hospital Orlando beginning her three-year residency in podiatric foot and ankle surgery, which she completed in 2009.
The first time Grant used a scalpel was “very nerve-racking,” she said. “The attending (physician) handed me the scalpel and said ‘here you go.’ It was almost like my hand wouldn’t work. I didn’t know if I could … I just took a big deep breath and said a little prayer under my breath and reminded myself that I’d been working toward this for 8 years,” she recalled.
In 2009 Grant joined Physician Associates of Florida, an Orlando Health multi-specialty group where she and Robert Duggan, DPM, are the only podiatric surgeons. She divides her time between offices in Lake Mary and Maitland, and Duggan staffs offices in Oviedo and Sand Lake.
Grant said she spends Monday-Thursday in clinic, where about 40 to 50 percent of her patients present with sports-related injuries. “I see a lot of runners and athletes,” she said, adding that about 10-15 percent of her patients are youngsters. “Everything from ingrown toenails to flat feet and sports injuries,” said Grant, who also takes emergency calls for foot and ankle fractures. But the majority of Grant’s schedule on Fridays, usually at South Seminole Hospital, are the bread-and-butter surgeries for bunions, hammer toes, tendon repairs and cyst removals, she said.
Grant said being part of a multi-specialty group like Physician Associates is a definite plus. “They have taken me in and supported me from the beginning, I’ve been with them almost 5 years and it is amazing to have this big network of physicians as a referral base,” she said.
Grant also has a much smaller and much more personal physician network: She is married to anesthesiologist Timothy Grant, MD, whom she met in the OR at Florida Hospital Orlando. “I thought he was married so I wasn’t giving him the time of day. It turned out I was completely wrong. He finally asked me out and I told him it was not a date, and that we were just going out as acquaintances. … Seven years later, here we are!” said Grant.
Being married to a fellow physician is a “huge advantage,” said 35-year-old Grant. “We understand each others’ lifestyles. We get it and we never question it. … It’s nice having someone to come home to who understands the language and mentality of what we do.”
The Grants also share an understanding about their faith. “I grew up in the church. My grandfather was a preacher. I’m not going to say I’m religious, but I do believe in the power of prayer and I believe we are all here for a purpose. I try to let that positivity come through to help put my patients at ease.” she said. “Surgery is a scary situation.”
Configuring her calendar with her husband’s can be a challenge, Grant said, so “when we have weekends when we are not on call, we use it to our advantage” by taking short trips and feeding an appetite for collecting art. “We make it work. We don’t have kids and, at the moment, we plan on not having kids because we just don’t know how we can fit a child into that mold right now,” she said.
In the meantime, Grant does have a list of leisure adventures to shoehorn into her busy life. As a runner who confesses she “has fallen off the wagon” with training, Grant has set a goal to run a full marathon. She also has the lofty intentions of sky diving and piloting a plane.
Grant’s approach to those pursuits is still to be determined.
LINKS:
ORL Physician Spotlight August 2014
Lori A. Grant, DPM http://www.paof.com/physicians/lori-grant-dpm
Physician Associates of Florida http://www.paof.com/
Orlando Health http://orlandohealth.com/orlandohealth/index.aspx
South Seminole Hospital http://www.orlandohealth.com/southseminolehospital/index.aspx
