MATCH DAY AND A BIRTHDAY
Medical school a family affair for Lynette Staplefoote-Boynton
It’s fitting that Match Day is also the fourth birthday of Lynette Staplefoote-Boynton’s son, Josiah. For them, her journey through medical school has truly been a family affair.
Match Day was also the fourth birthday of Staplefoote-Boynton’s son, Josiah.
Staplefoote-Boynton; her husband, Daniel; Josiah and 7-month-old Bessie Nia learned Friday that they will spend the next five years in Durham, N.C.—Staplefoote-Boynton matched at Duke University Medical Center in medicine-psychiatry.
“This was my top choice and I’m doing the specialty that I want – combined – so I’m just so excited. And I’m excited that we get so stay in North Carolina,” Staplefoot-Boynton said of her match. “Today means it’s real, that I’m going to be serving people the way that I’ve been training for the past four years.”
Four years ago, she welcomed Josiah and began classes at the Brody School of Medicine about four months later. As she’s learned how to be a doctor, she’s also learned to be a mother—a dual transformation that culminated on Match Day. For them, Josiah is symbolic of what life has brought along with growth, knowledge and understanding.
For the family, Match Day is a pivotal milestone in their next chapter.
“It’s not only going to be a place where I train and just really become myself as a doctor,” said Staplefoot-Boynton, a Winston-Salem native, “it’s the place where my kids are going to be raised for five years, and where Daniel is going to work, play and meet new friends. It’s a lot; it’s huge.”
No matter where their future takes them, they will always have ties to Brody—thanks in part to the timing of Josiah’s birth.
“He’s a true Brody baby,” Staplefoote-Boynton said of Josiah. “At this point, he’s an honorary MD. I called him my tutor for anatomy. There were so many times when I was literally poring for hours over the anatomy book and he was right there, whether he was napping or trying to pretend he was looking at it with me. He’s just as much of a trooper as anyone else in this family.”
Staplefoote-Boynton completed her undergraduate work at the University of Pittsburgh and decided to pursue medical school after she volunteered for Health Care for the Homeless. Through that organization, she met physicians who bridged meaningful relationships with their patients—and realized she could see herself doing that too through medicine. She decided to study psychiatry so that she would be trained to best serve “the whole body,” she said.
“I knew I wanted to address health disparities,” she said, “and as you address health disparities you have to not only deal with the physical health issues but the mental health issues because they are so intertwined.”
During her medical school years, Staplefoote-Boynton has “multi-tasked to the max,” said Daniel Boynton. That included supporting his own professional goals; he is a part-time student in ECU’s health informatics certificate program. As for other family members, despite his immersion in his mother’s studies, Josiah has dreams of being an astronaut. That mutual support has been key to making their next stage in life a successful one.
“It’s been an educational experience,” Boynton said. “She has definitely been a real inspiration and a great role model to our kids.”
Staplefoote-Boynton
Staplefoote-Boynton’s Brody experience also became interlaced with her own family’s growth. That’s because from the start, she could see the ties that bind Brody students, faculty and the ECU community.
“When I came down here for the interview, I was really drawn to the fact of the ‘Brody family,’” she said. “I knew at this point in my life and possibly wanting to start a family, I wanted to be in a place where it truly was a family.”
From meeting classmates who became lifelong friends to receiving advice from faculty mentors whose own experiences as mothers doubling as medical students and residents, many of her Brody experiences cemented her initial impression. That feeling carried over to ECU’s mission as well.
“ECU is really about the mission of serving eastern North Carolina but also people in general who may not have access to health care or access to opportunities,” Staplefoote-Boynton said. “It definitely means the opportunity to give back the way I want to give back. This institution really walks the walk, and just knowing that I got my education at an institution that really, to the core, values service really gives me a charge to carry that through my career.”
Like her classmates, Staplefoote-Boynton found out about her future in the medical profession in the midst of a global pandemic.
“It’s an honor, but it’s also a little daunting,” she said. “But Brody prepares us well so I’m looking forward to the challenge.”