One thing I like about plastics is that you can use all those "MacGyver" (an '80s television show) skills. You have to be creative. The public loves the cosmetic surgery. I think it's a dent in the car. That's the way I view it - I'm just taking out the dent. But cases like one I'm working on - reconstructing the groin area of a man who had Fournier's gangrene - that's what plastic surgery really can be about.

It's good for me because I specialize in patients of color. I think I'm a little bit more sensitive to the needs of African-American women, for instance. Black women have different body image issues than white women. Also keloids (overgrowth in scar tissue) - black skin is more prone to developing keloids than white skin. I know how to work with this problem.

She grew up in the South, picking cotton, and lost her hand in a fire at about the age of 4. She became a pediatrician at a time when there were fewer women overall in medicine, and very few black women. Nothing stopped her.

Very much so. She started buying real estate in Chicago when we were growing up. My summer job was to do what I was told to do. I'd get up, and my mom would tell me that my job for the day was to paint apartment 18B. That didn't mean a 9 to 5 job, either. If I had to stay there until 11 or 12 at night painting that apartment, I stayed there. If I said I didn't know how to do something, my mom would look at me and say, 'You can read, can't you?' There was very little that we weren't expected to do or to figure out how to do.

I was in training at Barnes, and Gabby was in training at Barnes, too. We met on the elevator, and I thought she was attractive and everything, but I figured she was married because everyone at Barnes is married. Then I saw her one day outside the Galleria, and we got to talking and I found out she wasn't married. We've been dating ever since. We're going to get married Nov. 25 in New Orleans, where she is from. Gabby is Peruvian, and her parents are both doctors and clinical professors.

I'm a board member and participating surgeon with Gateway to Hope. It's an organization that my partner, Dr. David Caplin, started. We provide breast cancer care for the underinsured. It's a great organization, and we just got a $120,000 grant from the Komen Foundation.

I don't know if you would call it a hobby exactly, but I founded a software company a while back. I developed medical software, but I've retired from that.

On a sunny day I get into the "Z," put on the Gap Band, take the top off the car and just drive. I'll put on my sunglasses and just go. I'll go anywhere.

It was a medical school graduation gift to me and my sister from my mother. It's a '93, and I just love it. Talk about being one of only a handful of black plastic surgeons - there was another 6-foot-2-inch black, plastic surgeon in Washington who also drove a pearl (colored) "Z." People often confused us with each other.

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