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Adam Johnson is an oncology fellow at AHN's Allegheny General Hospital.
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Breast cancer took a toll on his family. It also inspired his career.

Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette

Breast cancer took a toll on his family. It also inspired his career.

AHN oncology fellow Adam Johnson's family tree is filled with women who faced the disease

In an old news clip from 1991, a baby Adam Johnson sits on his mother’s lap. His mother cradles him as she describes her battle with breast cancer to a television interviewer, and how she didn’t think she’d be able to get pregnant again after chemotherapy and radiation.

Even as a child, Johnson knew his story: the “miracle” baby who arrived as a silver lining to the cancer that ravaged his family.

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Johnson’s grandmother died of breast cancer just months before his mother was diagnosed. His maternal aunt died of the disease in the mid-1990s. His mother’s cancer returned when Johnson was 10, and she died a decade later of complications related to her cancer treatment.

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His older sister — also a physician — tested positive for the BRCA “breast cancer” gene and had an elective double mastectomy. His aunt also tested positive, and had surgery this summer after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Last month, Johnson, 32, sat in a lobby after finishing a shift at Allegheny General Hospital. Just a couple months into his fellowship as a surgical oncology fellow, he now treats women in similar situations to his family members.

“I don’t think I truly understood the weight of a breast cancer diagnosis until now,” he said. “When you’re in the room in clinic and you have to say, ‘Your pathology came back invasive ductal carcinoma’ and seeing the women’s reactions. Some of them are crying, some have a sense of humor, a laugh, some of them are just quiet and stoic. Those are the moments I reflect on, ‘I wonder what my mom was thinking, I wonder what my aunt was thinking.’”

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Johnson was born in New Jersey, near McGuire Air Force Base where his father was stationed. He grew up in Warner Robins, Ga., near another air force base, and went to Morehouse College in Atlanta.

A year after his mother’s breast cancer came back, when Johnson was 11, she came down with a neutropenic fever — a fever while her white blood cells were already extremely low — while she was undergoing chemotherapy. The hospital didn’t recognize the dangers of the fever, said Johnson, and sent her home, where her kidneys and liver began to fail. While her liver recovered, her kidneys required dialysis. Johnson’s mother died in 2011 of sepsis caused by a dialysis line infection.

Adam JohnsonIn having him help her went she was ill, Adam Johnson thinks his mother “was getting me used to having good bedside patient care.” (Lucy Schaly//Post-Gazette)

Growing up, he believes that his mom was trying to nudge him toward becoming a doctor. An English teacher while she was well enough to work, she set up a shadowing experience for him with a local urologist while Johnson was in high school, and would sometimes ask him to help with her care in bed.

“I think she was getting me used to having good bedside patient care,” he said. “She was really getting me used to interacting with a sick person in a way that still demonstrates love, compassion and care.”

At Morehouse, he applied for and was accepted to an “early medical school selection program” with Boston University’ school of medicine that guaranteed his acceptance there as long as he fulfilled certain requirements.

In medical school, Johnson really began to understand what his mom had gone through — much of which he hadn’t realized as a child. “It was kind of a hard, eye-opening experience,” he said. “Like, oh my God, this is what my mom had. This is what was going on with her body.”

In medical school in Boston, people sometimes told him that his outgoing personality would lend itself well to family medicine. But he found himself enjoying surgery immensely. And “once I realized I liked surgery, I was pretty targeted and focused on becoming a breast surgical oncologist,” he said.

He did his residency in Kansas and Missouri and arrived in Pittsburgh this summer for the one-year fellowship. From here, he will go to five weeks of Air Force Reserves training in Alabama and then start a new, as yet undetermined job.

While in Pittsburgh, he plans to get tested himself for the breast cancer gene.

His family story isn’t one he volunteers with his patients, as he knows that his family doesn’t have all of the happy endings that patients might be looking for.

“But if someone asks specifically, ‘Why did you get into this field?,’ I will tell them honestly,” he said. “Sometimes I will say, ‘Hey, I have a passion for this. Because it’s the face of my family.’”

Anya Sostek: asostek@post-gazette.com 

First Published: October 13, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: October 13, 2023, 8:24 p.m.

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Adam Johnson is an oncology fellow at AHN's Allegheny General Hospital.  (Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)
Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette
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