Dr. Peggy Fuller, a Charlotte dermatologist, spent time as a prison doctor as a way to pay off medical school loans. That experience tapped into her ability to connect with all kinds of people.
Dr. Peggy Fuller never thought she'd find herself in federal prison.
But that's where she landed - as a doctor treating imprisoned women whose crimes ran the gamut from drug smuggling to fraud to murder.
But Fuller, now 51 and a Charlotte dermatologist who just celebrated the fourth anniversary of her practice, didn't have a choice. More than 20 years ago, a broken engagement set off a series of events that led her to default on her medical-school loans - more than $500,000 - and she had to pay them off by doing medical service in an underserved population.
"The most salient thing with prison is seeing the wire, the tall wire, and the bars," Fuller said, remembering her time at the Federal Medical Center prison in Lexington, Ky. "It's restricted - confined, mentally. I'd imagine some people might never go home. It's their permanent destination."
One of Fuller's lifelong friends, Brenda Smith, told her at the time that the prison "was an important place to be, and that she could do good work while she was there." Smith said one of the doctor's defining traits was her ability to connect with any sort of person, whether colleague or peer or inmate.
In fact, Fuller rose to become the coordinator of inmates with HIV/AIDS, which eventually inspired a trip to Africa to teach on the subject.
But the more time Fuller spent in the prison, the more she realized her background was not so different from the women there. After all, she grew up poor, and there were few opportunities simply handed to her.
Her family lived on a sharecropper's farm in Cedar Grove, near Chapel Hill. When she came across an inmate she had grown up with, she was struck by the consequences of the choices they'd both made in life.
"I was sad to see her in that situation," Fuller said.
The difference between them was that Fuller hadn't fallen into a bad crowd - instead, she turned hardships into motivation.
Integrating a school
Fuller and her five siblings grew up running through the woods, tending to goats and cows and rolling in the grass by her family's farm, which she now owns. She was one of the first African-American children to be integrated into an all-white elementary school.
She grew up without things like indoor plumbing, but her parents never taught her to feel sorry for herself.
"I never knew about poverty until someone told me I was poor," Fuller said.
She didn't let poverty get in the way. She earned a scholarship to study biology at Spelman College in Atlanta, and then was accepted to seven different medical schools. She decided on Tufts University in Boston in 1980, and then did her residency in internal medicine at a VA hospital in Boston and Boston City Hospital, now known as Boston Medical Center.
By that time, Fuller had a young son. When the toddler was 11 months old, he was burned in a kitchen accident that left scars on his arms. Fuller had always liked dermatology during her medical school rotations, and was affected by the care for her son's burns. So after her four years at the prison, she enrolled at Brown University in 1994 to study dermatology. In 1998, Fuller came to Charlotte and joined the staff of Charlotte Dermatology to be closer to her mom and dad.
Today, Fuller owns her own small practice, Esthetics, in the Elizabeth neighborhood. Her services are about 60 percent medical and 40 percent cosmetic, including spa treatments and laser hair removal.
And because Esthetics doesn't take health insurance - first-time visits are $180 - Fuller can spend as much time as she needs with her patients, said office manager Elizabeth Jackson.
Time with patients is one of Fuller's favorite things about the job.
And her past is a big part of who she is now - from a farm near Chapel Hill, to medical schools in the northeast, to a prison in Kentucky, and finally back home to North Carolina.
"Grace is why we ended up how we (my family) did," Fuller said, referring to the success she and her siblings found in life.
"People marvel at the formula, but it was just grace."
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