Pam Johnson was born January 1, 1965, in Cherry Point, North Carolina, the daughter of a Marine fighter pilot and a Polish Catholic mother who died in a car accident when Pam was seven. That loss pushed Pam into an adult role in her family long before she was ready for it — a role a close friend later named for her outright: she’d been the mother, the wife, the sister, the reason her family stayed together.

She grew up on a small Alabama cattle farm, closer to animals than people, dreaming of veterinary medicine. Basketball and a full-ride scholarship sent her to the University of Montevallo instead — until a car accident became her own wake-up call. She enrolled at Auburn’s College of Veterinary Medicine in 1991, graduated in 1995, and spent the next 25+ years building a small-animal practice in Newnan, Georgia, from associate to hospital director to owner, before selling it in 2020.

Then came the dive. A scuba trip went wrong, and Pam found herself certain it was over — until an overwhelming, unexplainable calm took hold. She woke up on a beach after CPR, and a woman she’d never met appeared at her hospital bedside claiming to have found her — a story no one else could ever confirm. That second chance is what led her, alongside her husband Pat, into her next venture in veterinary medicine.