Now a senior and in her fourth year at Lahey Clinic, where she is second-in-command for her whole hospital department on the weekend shift, Taylor was scared out of her mind her first day as a messenger-escort. She was working the 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift. At 5 p.m. she got a call to bring a patient from the emergency room to the morgue. The dead body belonged to an old lady who had been in a car accident. When Taylor arrived at the ER she was scared, crying, and shocked.
“I have never seen anything like that,” she said.
Taking the body to the morgue, she was glad to have a security guard with her who was nice. “The morgue is cold, creepy, and smells funny,” she said. Completing the unsettling picture, the fluorescent lights inside were flickering, “like in horror movies.”
By her second week, however, Taylor knew this was the job for her. Her main responsibility at Lahey, the world-famous hospital on Mall Road, is taking patients to and from different parts of the building, such as the operating room, X-ray, recovery room, and, of course, the morgue. She takes patients for procedures such as ultrasound or endoscopy, in which doctors look inside patients with a microscopic camera. She brings nurses and doctors the supplies they use, including blood, medical equipment, lab specimens – “anything they need, I’m there, sprinting like lightening,” she said.
Taylor found her job through her mother, a nurse at Lahey. Working after school, weekends and vacations, she barely has any days off. In May of 2008 she was promoted to section leader, in charge of people much older then herself, who don’t always give her the respect she deserves. “I have to work harder to make up for my age,” she said.
Her favorite part of the job is assisting in Code Blues, when a patient’s heart or breathing stops and doctors need to do CPR. Often, Taylor is the one who delivers the life-saving, paddle-shock equipment to the doctors and nurses.
Taylor remembers one Saturday at 7:32 a.m. She was beginning her workday when the call came over the loudspeaker: “Code Blue, 6 East.”
“I put my coffee and jacket down and grabbed an oxygen tank and a code cart and ran upstairs,” she said. When she got to the room, a crowd of 25 hospital staff was standing outside. Inside, a man was lying in a pool of blood on the floor, a doctor and two nurses working on him.
“Literally the floor was crimson – bright, bright red,” she said. “I didn’t realize you could lose that much blood and still be alive.”
She helped lift the patient into bed and ran to get coolers of stat blood and red blood cells for a transfusion. When she got back, she had to clean the blood off the floor so the rest of the personnel could come back in without risking infection.
The patient ended up pulling through.
“If I was not there, the patient would have died,” Taylor said.
The other gratifying part for her was caring for the patient’s family. His wife and two daughters were there, crying. Their clothes were so saturated with his blood, Taylor went to a supervisor and got them some hospital scrubs to wear. She brought them coffee and toast, which the man’s wife really seemed to appreciate.
“She gave me the biggest hug,” Taylor recalled. “She was like, ‘Thank you so much!’ She had a cute little southern accent.”
Taylor is going to Salem State next year for nursing. She considered medical school but didn’t want to go through 12 more years of school. She loves making patients feel better, loves helping them and hearing their stories, especially old people. And, of course, she loves the science.
“I think that the human body is fascinating,” she said.
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