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Alli Taylor has now been named a National Healthcare Hero and won $5,000. She was recently recognized as the Healthcare Hero for the month of May, that nomination was then entered into a nationwide contest and Alli was selected as a winner. She is a 2013 graduate of Manchester and is now a cardiac catheterization and angio specialist, in New Bern, North Carolina.
Taylor said her work involves heart catheterizations, pacemakers, transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), and “all things heart related.”
“If anybody has a heart attack in the middle of the night we get called in and do our job, just 10 times faster,” she said.
One of the most challenging aspects of that job is that not every patient can be saved, said Taylor. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has only added to that challenge.
“Our stuff is invasive and scary for patients and for their families, and during COVID we couldn’t have family members come in,” she noted. “It was hard telling spouses, especially older couples that haven’t ever been apart.”
Taylor also gets to witness the reverse of that heartache, she stressed, when people at their lowest moment are transformed.
“You get to see it visually, you see the heart arteries. You start off with something that’s nonexistent or completely closed off and we get to open that and save their life,” she said.
According to Taylor, the stress of the work, and the past year in particular, has only brought the hospital’s staff closer.
“Within my department it’s the same group of people so we see each other at 5:00 in the morning straight out of bed, so we’re all very much a family,” she remarked.
Taylor admitted she was shocked when she realized she had been chosen as a Healthcare Hero.
“I got the phone call and they said they had watched my interview and I’d won. I know I asked the guy three times, ‘Are you serious?”’
Taylor was nominated for the honor by her boyfriend, David Huggins. She said she wants to use the money to take a trip.
“I have never met a person more passionate for what they do than Alli,” Huggins wrote. “She strives to do the very best in all she does, and her care for patients is no different.”
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