biological sciences at Quinnipiac University<\/a>, and started medical school in 2021.<\/p>\nArticle continues below this ad<\/p>\n
Taylor-Allen admits to being embarrassed about her job at the time. Later, her husband advised her never to be ashamed of what she did.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was part of your story that made you who you are,\u201d she said he told her.<\/p>\n
Every employee in a hospital is vital to the organization, she added.<\/p>\n
\u201cKeeping the hospital clean is what keeps the doors open,\u201d Taylor-Allen said. \u201cWithout us, the hospital wouldn’t be running, so it taught me to respect and understand every position within the hospital. That’s going to make me the best doctor because I’ll show that respect to every position.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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She was inspired to enter the field while a sophomore in college, when her mother became severely injured.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had third-degree burns in her lungs from a house fire that we had a few years prior,” Taylor-Allen said. “We took her to the ER and they asked us if she had a history of mental illness.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Taylor-Allen said she didn’t understand why they kept asking about mental illness, when she knew her mother was sick and didn’t have a history of mental illness.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when she set out to conduct research about health care disparities. She reached out to Yale’s CEO, who she knew from cleaning her offices.<\/p>\n
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\u201cShe advocated for my mom, got her on a new team, and that’s when they diagnosed her with vocal cord dysfunction,” Taylor-Allen said. “Seeing the advocacy and seeing how much she helped, I knew I wanted to help other people that were in a similar situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
She has learned there are a great number of Americans who struggle with health care disparities and are often misdiagnosed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of them get shut out or get silenced because the first thing they want to say is that it could be a mental illness instead of trying to figure out what’s going on with them,\u201d Taylor-Allen said.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what propelled her to go into medicine.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhen it happened, I was so upset, and that anger fueled me into wanting to go into this career, as I want to make a change,\u201d Taylor-Allen said.<\/p>\n
Taylor-Allen\u2019s experience speaks to a deeper message, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She believes her story resonates because it\u2019s the epitome of the American Dream.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThey love hearing that story of starting from the bottom and making it to where you need to be,” she said. “That old saying of treating the janitor like the CEO is in full force here.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Haven native Shay Taylor-Allen, a Howard University School of Medicine student and former a janitor at Yale…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[13589,97,252,253,114238],"class_list":["post-587393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-ct-insider","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare","tag-new-haven-register"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}