Shay Taylor, center, at last Wednesday’s Thanksgiving Giveback. Credit: Lisa Reisman photo Among the volunteers handing out bags of stuffing and yams at a recent Thanksgiving Giveback on Sylvan Avenue was a woman in a matching maroon sweatshirt and headband. She was wearing a Yale School of Me dicine ID card. Eight years ago, Shay Taylor had a different Yale ID card, one that read “Environ Svc Assoc.” At that time, Taylor worked as a janitor. She’s now in her fourth year at the Howard University College of Medicine. Taylor had taken the Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) janitor job fresh out of Wilbur Cross, where she graduated in the top 10 percent of her class. “My mom ran a really strict household,” Taylor, 32, said. “School came first. She never went to college, so that was the dream.” She planned to use her earnings to pay for college and otherwise support herself. She would work as a YNHH janitor for the next 10 years. Early Yale ID card. Courtesy Shay Taylor Not long into her college career, her mother started having health issues that had her in and out of the emergency room. There had been a house fire a few years earlier. The smoke had damaged her lungs. The symptoms were getting worse and worse. She recalled when she first brought her mother to the ER. Her mother was gasping for breath, her oxygen levels were low, but, she said, the doctors didn’t seem to take those symptoms seriously. “They asked if she had a mental illness, and this happened each time I brought her in,” she said. Taylor grew distraught. Then, one day, an idea came to her. At the time, she was routinely assigned to clean the office of Yale New Haven’s then-CEO Marna Borgstrom. “I doubt she knew my name, but I knew she would say hi to me everyday, so I emailed her about what was going on with my mom,” she recalled. Borgstrom replied the next day. “She apologized this was happening and promised to meet with the team and figure out what’s going on,” Taylor recalled, shaking her head with wonder. Within a week of the email came the diagnosis: vocal cord dysfunction, a condition that can occur years after the initial trigger. “She had inhaled all this smoke and that damaged the muscles of her vocal cords, and they were closing up when she tried to breathe so it felt like she was breathing through a straw,” she said. Months of rehabilitation, including respiratory retraining therapy and speech therapy, followed.  “Everyone was relieved,” she said. “There were answers, and my mom wasn’t crazy.” Taylor was changed as well. In the midst of her research, she grew aware that her mother’s plight was far from uncommon. “I read all these studies about how doctors don’t hear Black women or see their pain,” she said.“I wanted to be in a position to help people like my mom.” By then, Taylor was in her junior year at Southern Connecticut State University. She was a general studies major. “I knew I wanted to do something with my life, and I knew I could do it, I just didn’t know what it was,” she recalled. She switched to biology. She had two years to satisfy the pre-med requirements. Even then, she said, “I had an advisor telling me ‘hey, this is crazy, maybe you should think about something else.’” Newly minted SCSU graduate in biology. Courtesy Shay Taylor That only made her more determined, it seems. “Once I decided to be a doctor, I knew I had to get it done,” she said. “I was ready to put the work in.” As hard as she worked, she gradually realized two years might not be enough to prepare her for medical school. She enrolled in a graduate program in biomedical sciences at Quinnipiac University.   In her second year, she applied to medical schools. Each one turned her down. She didn’t give up. During the second round, she happened to see a post on Instagram about the mentorship squad, a program for Black and Latino women on their path to becoming physicians. She filled out the application. Then came a call. It was Dr. Gena Foster, an assistant professor in medical oncology and hematology at the Yale School of Medicine. “She showed me there was a way to tell my story that would help me shine through,” Taylor said. Foster noted that nowhere in her application was there mention that she had worked as a janitor. “I was honestly embarrassed about that, and she said ‘no, it’s a huge part of your story.’” Regarding the travails of getting a diagnosis for her mother, Foster told her to focus on the advocacy skills she developed and, as she put it, “how it taught me how important it was to be there for my patients the way I was for my mom.” That spring, an acceptance letter came from Howard University College of Medicine. She is now applying for a residency in anesthesiology. All the while, she’s been sharing her story on Tiktok. When she announced her assignment to Yale for a sub-internship for the month of November, the representatives from the Jennifer Hudson Show reached out to her. On the show, Dr. Foster made an appearance. “She has built me up so much,” Taylor said of Foster. “Every time I have doubts, she tells me ‘you are meant to be here.’” Her hope is to match at Yale School of Medicine. She’ll find out in March. “This place has given me opportunity in so many ways,” she said, pointing at her ID card at Wednesday’s Thanksgiving Giveback. “Just like Dr. Foster did for me, I want to pay that forward.” The post Former YNHH Janitor Returns, As Med Student appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less