Shanaye (Shay) Michelton

My journey in healthcare started in 2008 when I was a personal care assistant and home health aide for my mom, who suffered from a multitude of chronic illnesses. I knew her prescription schedule and her doctor's schedule better than I knew my ABCs and 123s. Through caring for her and other clients dealing with everything from chronic pain to paraplegics to cirrhosis of the liver, I realized that most of the time, all they were missing was that human element of somebody that legitimately cares. It's really easy to just put people as numbers and a revolving door of get the patient in, get them seen, get them out, next one - but these are people. You may be the only person that this one person talks to for days, or weeks, or months. That realization changed my mindset about direct patient care. I wanted to help more people in more different backgrounds, so I pursued my certificate of medical assisting at Everest Institute from February 2011 to November 2011. Healthcare became a big puzzle to me, and if you're anything like me, I love a puzzle. And if you think that I can't solve it, watch me prove you wrong, because I'm going to work to get it and stay at it until I can solve it. I don't just want to know how to complete the puzzle, I want to know what breaks it. I want to see it from beginning to end. I became a certified medical assistant in 2013 - I sweated bullets taking that test because every practice test I took before then, I failed. My test stopped on me in the middle of it, and I thought I had failed, but it said pass. I couldn't believe it. Once I knew that no matter how many failures I had before this, I could still come in and get a yes so long as I tried, that transferred over into my patient care philosophy: I don't care how many doctors a patient has gone to that has given them a bad experience - when you get to me, you have no choice but to have a good experience. If the only thing I can do today is give you a good experience, and listen to you, and let you know that you are heard, seen, and valued as a human, not a number, I've done my job for the day. I went on to work in various different practices - family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, chiropractic care, behavioral health, mental health, podiatry, specialties, whatever I could get my hands on. I wanted to understand everything from billing and coding to how Blue Cross Blue Shield works differently from Aetna. By 2013-2014, I realized it took me that long to gain this kind of understanding, and I thought: what would happen if I could take all of this information and give it to people who are vulnerable, low-income, marginalized, and have them help out people who are just like them - the people who fall through the cracks the most? Now I'm pursuing my bachelor's in public health at Walden University, and I'm teaching people who are coming from those marginalized demographics. This information that took me over a decade to learn, people are learning right off the rip, and they're going and sharing it with others. When my students come up to me and say, 'Hey, Ms. Shay, my mom is dealing with this,' and I ask them to explain it back to me, and they can convey it as if they've been doing it for as long as I have, I know I've won, and I know they're gonna win. That type of knowledge can't do anything but spread. And if we can spread negativity, we can spread knowledge to create positive spaces and positive changes.