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Health and Medicine

Major medicine

Nothing she has done in her career compares to the challenges she faced when she enlisted in the Army and served as a trauma surgeon in Iraq in 2010 and Afghanistan in 2013.

Amy Alger, a trauma and critical care surgeon at UNC Hospitals and Major in the U.S. Army Reserves, has always been drawn to trauma — to taking care of the sickest patients in the hospital and trying to make them better.

“The care for every trauma patient is different,’’ she said. “It’s that diversity that makes me want to keep learning, prevents me from feeling complacent, and forces me to stay on top of the current literature.”

Alger came to Chapel Hill in 2011 from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where she graduated with the hospital’s first class of acute care fellows. Being first, trying something new, and challenging herself are central components of her medical experiences. The central New York native took an uncommon route to residency by attending medical school in the Caribbean, and while at Brigham and Women’s, she participated in the Emmy-nominated television documentary series Boston Med. But nothing she has done in her career compares to the challenges she faced when she enlisted in the Army and served as a trauma surgeon in Iraq in 2010 and Afghanistan in 2013.

“I wanted to broaden my experience,” she said of her decision to serve. “Combat medicine, military medicine, is an entirely different world. It challenges you at a completely different level. You may be asleep and then all of a sudden you’re running an eight-patient mass casualty within 60 seconds. It’s something that I read about but never fully understood until I got there.”

Alger’s decision to enlist was rooted in a long-held desire to serve her country. Her great uncles served in World War II, and her father was in the Army. She was living in New York City during the September 11 attacks, an experience she carries with her today. Then, six years later, while talking to friends who were serving in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, she heard accounts of the effects of the Army’s shortage of trauma surgeons on injured soldiers.

“I was giving care, in some cases, to gang members who didn’t want my help and who threatened to hurt me,” she remembered. “We were providing some of the best care in the world to some of the most troubled people in Boston, yet our soldiers were having a hard time getting coverage. I wasn’t married and I didn’t have kids, so I felt that joining was the least I could do to help.”

Preparation for Alger’s first deployment began in 2009 with basic training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. She was the only female trauma surgeon in the unit.

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