April 1, 2025
From the Front Lines to the Exam Room, Amy Ester is Redefining Patient Care
By Gina Horan
From the Front Lines to the Exam Room, Amy Ester is Redefining Patient Care
Amy Ester, FNP-C
Owner of Anchored in Health
Amy is more than a family nurse practitioner. She’s a wife, a proud mom of three, and the driving force behind Anchored in Health in Oxford.
She is also a proud Army veteran.
“I walked into the recruiting station when I was 18,” she says. “At that time, women weren’t being accepted into combat roles, so I went the X-ray route instead.”
After training in Germany, she was deployed to Iraq in 2004.
“Some went to Tikrit, some to Fallujah, and I ended up in Mosul,” she recalls.
While she admired the doctors in the field, it was the relentless and compassionate nurses who left the biggest impression.
“My mom and grandma were nurses, but I didn’t realize it was in my blood until later,” she says. “When I was stationed at Walter Reed working in women’s imaging and caring for soldiers fresh from the field, I realized I wanted to do more.”
Being in D.C. also brought her future husband, Jimmy, into her life.
“He was in the Presidential Salute Battery for Arlington,” she says with a smile. “We’ve built this whole life together.”
Amy planned to be career soldier, but fate had other plans.
“Every time I thought I’d move up, I got pregnant,” she says with a laugh. “My first pregnancy was traumatic, and I was inspired by the nurses who cared for me.”
Then, a personal loss changed Amy forever.
“My son was stillborn in 2013, and that kind of loss could have broken me, but it didn’t,” she says. “It made me want to help people even more.”
Eleven months later, she had her youngest child.
“Now, I have three kids here and one in heaven,” she says.
That loss also shaped her approach to medicine.
“The difference between sympathy and empathy is huge,” she says. “I’ve been through a lot, and I know what it feels like so I think those experiences make me a better caregiver.”
She also refuses to conform to the fast-paced, impersonal nature of modern medicine with its quotas and numbers racket.
“Healthcare has moved too far from the patient,” she says. “I plan to bring it back to the personal relationship it deserves.”
Gina moved to central Florida in August of 2021 from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and spent 10 years as a fashion editor, columnist and food writer for The Knight Ridder Newspaper group. She was also a photo stylist and covered concerts, fashion shows and festivals all over Northern California. In 2000, she joined KSAN radio as a morning show co-host and produced the news and sports content there for 4 years. She also covered travel, events and the restaurant scene for KRON-Bay TV. She is a veteran bartender and has worked in hospitality on and off since high school. Her passions include travel, road trips, history books, baseball, tasting menus and most of all, landing in a new city with no map or guidebook. Gina lives in Oxford with her mom, cats and baby hamster.
