Anita Hunt Hickey, MD, CAPT, MC USN (ret), 65, passed away on February 19, 2019 from complications of breast cancer. Anita was born April 19, 1953 in San Diego, CA the fourth daughter and fifth child of Jay B. and Roberta MacKnight Hunt. The family moved to Flagstaff, AZ and grew to seven children.
Anita graduated from Moon Valley high school in Glendale, AZ in 1971, and received her B.S. in Chemistry at Northern Arizona University prior to attending medical school at University of Arizona. Anita completed her post-doctoral fellowship in Pain Management at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Children’s Hospital in Boston, and at the time of her passing she was completing a second fellowship in Integrative Medicine at University of Arizona. Anita was board certified in Anesthesia, Pain Management, and Integrative Medicine.
In 1987 she was commissioned as a U. S. Naval Medical Corps officer and continued to proudly served her country for 28 years. Anita served multiple deployments supporting the Global War on Terrorism aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and USS George Washington (CVN-73). She performed multiple humanitarian missions, including deployments aboard the USNS Mercy, and supporting NATO operations in Kosovo, Yugoslavia. She retired from active duty in 2015 after completing her tour in Okinawa, Japan. After retiring from the Navy, Anita continued to care for the active duty and general military population she loved so much as a Pain Management / Anesthesia physician at the Naval Medical Center San Diego.
Anita served in many leadership positions, authored numerous peer reviewed publications and book chapters on topics including pain management, post-traumatic stress disorder, and acupuncture. She recently authored a book titled Pain Is Not What It Seems: The Guide to Understanding and Healing from Chronic Pain and Suffering. She has spoken at numerous medical conferences on Integrative Medicine and Pain Management. She was selected as the Integrative Medicine and Pain Medicine United States Navy representative for the Army Surgeon General’s task force on pain management, whose report recommending a holistic, multidisciplinary, and multimodal pain management strategy was published in 2010. She was awarded multiple honors and awards, including the Meritorious Service Medal, Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with two stars, Navy Meritorious Unit Medal, Humanitarian Service Medal with star, Overseas Medal with star, Sea Service Medal, NATO Medal, South East Asia Medal, and Navy Expeditionary Medal.
She met her husband Stephen Patrick Hickey in 1993 and they married in 1995. Together they traveled the world and lived in many places such as Naples, Italy; Newport, RI; Jacksonville, FL; San Diego, CA; Boston, MA and Okinawa, Japan. In 2005, Anita gave birth to twins, Sarah Elizabeth and Ethan Patrick at Naval Medical Center San Diego. Ethan preceded Anita in death, shortly after birth, due to unsustainable complications. Sarah attends 8th grade at High Tech Middle Chula Vista, plays the piano, is active in swimming and is interested in pursuing an education in Science and Technology. Preceding her marriage to Stephen, Anita’s beloved daughter Alicia was born in 1976 in Napa, CA, currently resides Mt. Shasta, CA with her daughter Una, age 11, and shares passion for being a good mother, creating art, gardening and continually growing into alignment with her highest self.
Anita is loved and missed by many. She was a cherished wife, mother, daughter, sister, aunt, niece, cousin, friend, mentor, colleague, philanthropist, and author. She touched the lives of so many with her faith, her courage, her unique mixture of sophistication and innocence, intelligence and absolute openness to learning, propriety and practicality, elegance and simplicity. She sincerely loved and reached out to others, truly seeing them as her brothers and sisters. She saw their courage as human beings and gave them love and encouragement to achieve success. She was selfless, loving, hardworking, dependable, with faultless integrity. She had her fears yet always had great hope, faith and courage that she and all of us would overcome life’s hardships.
Please help us to always remember and honor her, each in our own way every day, to reach out with forgiveness and compassion to others as she did in her life, to seek out the beautiful, the uplifting, the inspiring in life, so that when our own lives wind to an end, and we each return to the universe, that we will each hear “Well done, you have made the world a better place.”
Anita is survived by her husband Stephen Hickey, her daughters Sarah Hickey and Alicia Suarez, granddaughter Una Suarez, her sisters and brother: Roberta Graham, Kristine Tom, Debra Hunt, Jeffrey Hunt, Clenice Vincent and many nieces, nephews and beloved friends. Anita was preceded in death by her brother and mentor John B. Hunt.
In lieu of flowers and/or cards, contributions to Sarah’s 529 College Savings Plan at: https://gift.my529.org/29T4DZ would be greatly appreciated.
For extended information please contact: sphickey@gmail.com
