But this month, Spaner went from treating car accident victims to patching combat soldiers.

The 47-year-old doctor, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, is serving in a medical unit in Iraq.

The assignment is another turn in Spaner's unusual life. He was a hell-raiser who barely made it through high school. His transformation from leather-clad, street-fighting Hell's Angels-wannabe to doctor was chronicled in The Plain Dealer in 1997.

"He was so wild," a childhood friend told the newspaper then. "People probably thought he'd be dead a year or two after graduation."

Instead, Spaner joined the Coast Guard. He liked the feel of saving people, plunging into Lake Erie for a rescue. He went on to paramedic school, worked for an ambulance company and decided to pursue medicine. He had a plastic surgeon remove tattoos that ran up and down both arms because he didn't think a doctor should scare his patients.

After a residency at the former Mt. Sinai hospital, Spaner went to work at Hillcrest.

In recent years, he has been called away from his wife, Pam, and their three children to serve in Afghanistan and Egypt. He is expected to serve in Iraq for three months.

"He feels it's his job, his calling not to fight the war but to take care of the soldiers who are fighting it," said Pam, a urological oncology nurse at the Cleveland Clinic.

Spaner e-mails friends and family regular updates from the war. He is allowing his home state newspapers, The Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com, to post his digital diary.

You can read his entries at "Postcards from Iraq"

Pam Spaner said the e-mails are comforting to her.

"You have no idea what the environment is like, so you imagine the worst," she said. "The word 'Iraq' automatically makes you afraid."