Her island has no hospital. So she chose to go to medical school.
Yihana Melendez Alejandro decided at age 7 she wanted to be a doctor.
Alejandro, now a first-year medical student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is from Vieques, an island eight miles off the east coast of Puerto Rico. Vieques has no hospital and had only one small primary care clinic that was destroyed by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and has yet to reopen. For Alejandro, this served as inspiration to pursue medical school.
She remembers a joyous childhood filled with family and softball and a tight-knit community.
“It’s a very small island,” Alejandro said. “So I knew my high school class since we were in kindergarten.”
But she also remembers stark barriers to getting medical care. All 8,000 residents shared two primary care doctors at the Susana Centeno Family Health Center, Alejandro said. And Vieques residents in need of emergency medical care usually had to take a ferry or fly in a small plane or helicopter to the main island for treatment.
That is, unless the weather was bad and restricted travel, in which case patients suffered and sometimes died.
“Unfortunately, a lot of people die because we have to wait until a helicopter arrives,” Alejandro said.
That included a classmate of Alejandro’s younger brother — a 13-year-old girl who died in 2020 because she was struggling to breathe and the island did not have a ventilator.
https://captimes.com/news/education/her-island-has-no-hospital-so-she-chose-to-go-to-medical-school/article_9f2fe23a-1161-4733-8ae7-1ca737d33269.html
The way Puerto Rico has been neglected is shameful. Period.