Taylor Continues Defying Odds

BEATING THE ODDS

Born three months prematurely, Taylor and her twin sister, Jordyn, barely weighed two pounds each, and both experienced complications. Taylor suffered a brain hemorrhage. The prognosis was grim, and doctors told her parents she likely would never walk or talk.

But she did. Three years ago, Taylor surprised her friends and family when she walked across the UMHB graduation stage without her walker to re­ceive her bachelor’s degree in psychology.

“It was the perfect day, and that was a perfect moment,” she said of that day in May 2019.

But in the three years since she received her undergraduate degree, Taylor has been through what seems like an entire lifetime of ups and downs.

After graduation, she was thrilled for an adventure when she and her sister packed up and moved to Utah to work.

“I wanted to get a job on a résumé, and I just needed some personal development time,” she said. Taylor went to work at a coffee shop that employs people with different abilities. It was an amazing adventure. She loved learning to work with others with different challenges, like communicating with a deaf co-worker using the sign language she had learned in a class at UMHB.

But then the setbacks began.

SLOWED DOWN BUT NOT DEFEATED

Taylor’s cerebral palsy symptoms seemed to be getting worse. Even after several trips to the emergency depart­ment, doctors continued to chalk up her symptoms to cerebral palsy. For Taylor, CP primarily affected her legs, making muscles stiff and weak. She was used to using a walker, but her flare-ups got so bad it became difficult to do the chores of daily life.

“I started having symptoms that were not really asso­ciated with CP, and the doctor’s previous thoughts didn’t make sense anymore,” Taylor said.

At age 23, doctors finally diagnosed Taylor with mul­tiple sclerosis, a disabling central nervous system disease that causes pain, fatigue, and impaired coordination. Tay­lor and her family didn’t just sit back and let MS damage her body further though. “That’s when we decided to take the aggressive route,” she said.

She traveled to Mexico for intense chemotherapy treatments for MS called HSCT or haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. According to the Multiple Sclerosis Society, the treatment uses one’s own stem cells and aims to keep the MS symptoms from progressing by first wip­ing out the immune system and then rebuilding it.

“I’ve definitely seen improvement,” she said. “I do think it is because I went so quickly (for HSCT treat­ment) after I was diagnosed.”

Now, she is back on track again and has completed the first two semesters back at UMHB to get her master’s degree.

Even though she said it has been a “whirlwind of a year,” she hasn’t once doubted herself or God.

“All the stuff that I’ve been through has been really hard,” she said. “But looking back, I really think that it was God preparing me for the path that He wanted me on.”