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From Janitor To Doctor At Yale

When Shay Taylor-Allen found out she had matched with her first-choice medical residency at Yale New Haven Hospital, she said she was jumping up and down so hard she thought the concrete might break. The reaction makes a lot more sense when you know the full story. The 32-year-old, who is about to graduate from Howard University College of Medicine, was not just born at Yale New Haven Hospital. She also mopped its floors as a janitor when she was 18 years old, cleaning offices in the same building where she will soon be practicing medicine as a doctor. Her video reaction went viral within days, with more than 3.7 million people watching the moment she learned she was going back.

The journey from janitor to doctor was not a straight line. Taylor-Allen did not always know she wanted to go to medical school, and it was not until her second year of college, when her mother became seriously ill, that everything came into focus. She was working as a janitor at the same hospital while her mother was sick, and during those difficult weeks she found the courage to approach the hospital’s former CEO, whose office she cleaned, and share what her family was going through. That conversation led to help for her mother that changed the outcome. The experience of seeing firsthand what advocacy could do became the spark that set her on the path toward medicine. Taylor-Allen will join Yale’s Department of Anesthesiology later this year, returning to the community where she grew up and the hospital that shaped her life in more ways than one. She described the whole thing as surreal, and said she hopes her story is a reminder that people of color are needed in medicine and that patients are waiting for doctors who look like them.

Source: https://www.today.com/parents/family/shay-taylor-janitor-to-doctor-yale-match-rcna264745

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