North Bay Woman

F A L L 2 0 1 5 | NORTH BAY WOMAN 37 presenting the award to her at the Honor Thy Healer program. "She took care of healing the person," he emphasized. "There really wasn't treatment [for my friend] but Dr. Kelley got her to a place where she was accepting of what was going on." To focus on the compassion is not to dis- count Kelley's medical expertise. A graduate of Yale University, Kelley went on to study medicine at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, one of the top 20 medical schools in the U.S. Despite her academic success and her privileged upbringing, Kelley encountered the trials of being marginalized when at medical school she was told that her gender and sexual orientation would be an impediment to studying general surgery. But that didn't stop her. "I knew I was going to be a doctor before I started grade school," Kelley said. "When I was 4, I told my mother I was going to be a doctor." Even though there had never been medical practitioners in the family, Kelley's father, a cor- porate lawyer, and her mother, a teacher, were encouraging and "tremendously supportive" of her choice. "Education was more important than ac- complishment," she remembers of her parents' attitude. The middle child in a trio of girls (including a younger foster sister), Kelley was 14 when her family moved to Europe. There, she became fluent in both Spanish and French. There, too, she indulged her interest in history, the subject she eventually majored in as an undergraduate and which became integral to her philosophy of practicing medicine. There was no seminal event that led her to study breast cancer. Coming to the de- cision "was pretty gradual," she said. The foundation was her lifelong interest in empow- ering women, which focused her studies on women's health. Her training was first and foremost in the surgical care of >>

• Cover