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As a kidney disease specialist, Dr. Mary Margaret “Peggy” Mouracade is always expanding her repertoire. Recently, she obtained a fellowship in addiction medicine to further help her patients, since drug and alcohol abuse can lead to poor kidney function and bring people to her clinic. The fellowship was particularly significant for Mouracade, whose husband, Thomas, celebrates 22 years of recovery this year. The couple opened their outpatient recovery program, The Kimberly Center, in 2016, to offer continuing therapeutic care and a sober-living residence program for recovering addicts. “Working in medicine and addiction recovery is so pure,” she says. “It’s a one-on-one relationship, and I have to gain a patient’s trust.”  The daughter of a vascular surgeon father, Mouracade grew up understanding her future was her choice. While she followed in her father’s footsteps to go into healthcare, she went the internal medicine route, rather than surgical like her dad. She attended Wake Forest University for medical school and then the University of Florida for her internal medicine residency.   After 26 years at Associates in Nephrology in Fort Myers, Mouracade starts every appointment with the same question: “How are you?” She might ask the question hundreds of times to any given patient because she really wants to know. “The way I see it, I do comprehensive care, not just nephrology,” she says. “You have to treat the patient as a whole.” Medical students praise Mouracade’s in-depth knowledge of her patients’ lives and histories. “I don’t have to go through their charts,” she says. “That’s how I’m able to build trust.”  And she still has the same appreciation for her specialty that she did when she was a medical student. “Nephrology is like internal medicine on steroids,” she says. “It may not be sexy, but it’s so necessary. And it’s such a major part of your being. You truly see the new lease on life patients get when their kidneys are treated for properly.”—Nila Do Simon

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