13:52
Returning back to Yale now as a doctor, where I spent ten years as a janitor just feels so surreal. At one point, I was wearing that tan top, which was my janitor top, and now I'm walking in with my white coat and I got so emotional. My name is Doctor Shay Taylor-Allen. I'm 32 years old. I live near New Haven, Connecticut with my husband Rob. I'm a doctor at Yale New Haven Hospital where I was born and where I used to clean as a janitor. The skills that I learned being a janitor definitely, I believe, helped in some way with becoming a doctor. The biggest thing is how I speak to my patients.
I think some physicians forget that we are actually caring for actual people and that value of empathy can kind of go away with the many of years of us going to school. I am specializing in the best specialty, anesthesiology. Originally, when I went to medical school, I thought I was going to do OBGYN and I found out that the hours are crazy. I chose anesthesiology for a number of reasons. Of course, my mom dealt with vocal cord dysfunction, so I wanted to be near the airway somehow, and I just wanted patients to feel comfortable before surgery. And of course, with me being older now and me being married, I wanted a field or a specialty that can kind of have a work-life balance.
The amount that I took out in loans specifically for medical school was about over $300,000. But altogether for undergrad, my master's with medical school, I'm over $590,000 in debt. So I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. I lived here most of my life. We grew up kind of on the poverty side of things. But I didn't grow up thinking that our life was any different. Being black in New Haven, there was like two different types of jobs that you can have. So people either work like a government job or they worked at the hospital, and those were our secure jobs at the time.
We lost everything in that fire. Our home, clothes, pictures, everything you could think of completely was gone from that fire and we had to start over again. She would be sick all the time because she was susceptible to a lot of infections with her having those third-degree burns. I just remember one day we went to the emergency room and they told me that she had to be admitted, but they also asked me if she had any history of mental illness. So I'm just like, no, she has no history of mental illness at all.
And I couldn't quite understand why they were asking me that. So I went home, of course, did a little bit of research, and that's when I started to learn more about healthcare disparities and things that people of color, specifically black women, deal with when they go to the doctors or the emergency room. At the time when I was a janitor, I also took out the trash for the CEO. So I emailed her and I let her know what my mom was going through. And that's when the CEO reached back out to me, and she did everything she could to advocate for my mom for better health care.
She advocated for them to figure out what her diagnosis was, which we found out was vocal cord dysfunction. After my mom got sick and we dealt with those health care disparities, I just got this bright idea of, let me become that doctor that I felt like should have helped my mom, and that's when I decided to go to medical school. My husband and I actually met in 2023 and we got married in July of 2024. He came into my life and he just helped so much. So I didn't have to worry too much about any of the bills or anything like that. He was in the military for 12 years, so he get those veteran benefits as well.
Another thing that my husband has done in order to make sure that we are stable is selling crypto. A lot of people don't understand what it takes for a medical student to move for residency and the cost burden. A lot of people don't give us loans because we already have huge loans out, and our debt to income ratio is just horrible. A lot of our expensive did come from dining out as well as groceries. We also ate out a lot during that period of time, because I was going back and forth from Connecticut to D.C. in order to find an apartment and do things like that.
The first two years of school, I had to support myself, mainly through federal student loans when I was applying for residency. All together, I spent about $1,300 on just applications alone. I applied to 64 programs for residency and I got five interviews. So for me, Yale was my number one. But there was a small chance that I wouldn't match at Yale. I'm going to Yale. My residency program at Yale for anesthesia is four years. Once I start the job as a resident, I definitely expect our finances to change for the better, of course. So my plan to pay off the debt while I'm in residency,
we have the option of keeping it in deferment. I'm hoping that by the time that I graduate, politically things will be changing or getting back for the better. Where I'll be able to do an income-based repayment plan. My husband and I actually have a plan once I start getting paychecks for my residency, to invest back into what we kind of depleted. And those plans are for our future goals. So our future goals of starting a family, as well as if we want to take a vacation because we haven't been able to take a vacation since we met because of everything that we have to pay for. So once I finish residency and I'm fully now an attending, and I'll be an anesthesiologist practicing on my own, I can expect anywhere between maybe like
$150,000 a year to up to $700,000 a year. I don't see myself staying in New Haven past residency only because I like different options. I like to kind of move around and see what I like. I didn't grow up with doctors in my family. I didn't even see a black doctor face to face. I didn't grow up like that. And there was many times I just felt like, there's no way that this is even possible for somebody that looks like me and somebody who grew up like I grew up. But I think the biggest thing was the story that happened with my mother.
I made this whole journey very personal to me. I had this mission I had to accomplish. I had to help other people that looked like my mother. So I kept saying that to myself, like, if I don't do it, who's gonna do it? And I think that was the biggest thing for me is making sure I completed this mission, make sure I helped more people that look like me, make sure I came back to my city and help my people as well.
