Enjoying a happy homecoming

A career path charted early in life took Pia Gardner north to college and medical school.

But the 1988 Plant High School graduate eventually steered a southerly course that returned her to Tampa and St. Joseph's Hospital where, as a teenage volunteer, she had assumed her earliest medical duties.

Since November, the girl who grew up in the Tampa Heights house her paternal grandfather built in 1919 has been a pediatrician at St. Joseph's, dividing her medical duties between the facility's children's hospital and its clinic.

It has been a happy homecoming. "I love St. Joseph's; good nurses, good doctors," she said during a break in a morning shift recently at the children's hospital, 3001 W. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Stopping points on the long road home included Alabama's Talladega College, where Gardner graduated at the top of her 1992 class with a bachelor's degree in biology.

In 1997, after medical school at Howard University in Washington, she returned to Tampa for her internship at the University of South Florida.

She worked at All Children's Hospital from 2000 through 2002, followed by seven years at the Johnnie Ruth Clarke Health Center, the south St. Petersburg clinic of the not-for-profit Community Health Centers of Pinellas.

"I had two visions," said Gardner, 39. One was to work at a hospital. "And I wanted to serve the underserved. So I went to work with patients of lower economic status."

Serving residents of a low-income area also helped repay her federal education loan from the National Health Service Corps.

Gardner's earliest interest in medicine can be traced to age 3. "My aunt worked at Tampa General Hospital as a nursing assistant. She brought home her stethoscope, and I was just fascinated with her stethoscope," Gardner recalls.

Similar influence came from others in the family, including two uncles - one a physician in New York and another who was a podiatrist in Philadelphia. She also was impressed by her own Tampa pediatrician, Earl Pippin. "I thought he fixed everything," she said with a smile.

As a child, Gardner was enthralled by the "The Body Human," a weekly 1977 television documentary detailing various organs and their purposes. "I was just fascinated with how the body functions," she said.

It was her Tampa roots that drew her home. After medical school, she considered an internship that would keep her in Washington or perhaps New York.

But when her father became ill with heart disease, "I wanted to be closer to home," she said.

Tampa-born Robert Gardner Sr. worked 42 years in Hillsborough County schools as a teacher, guidance counselor and supervisor of personnel services.

"He loved education; he loved working with kids," Gardner said of her father, who died in 2004 at age 79. "He was my best friend."

Pia Gardner, who lives in Westchase with her 6-year-old daughter, regularly visits her 76-year-old mother, Lillian, at the family homestead in Tampa Heights, a 10-minute drive from the hospital.

Gardner has only memories of her days as a junior-high-age volunteer at St. Joseph's, assisting nurses and doctors however possible.

"I had my uniform forever - my uniform and my badge," she said. Well, at least until two years ago. That, she said, is when her mom apparently gave them away.