A broken ankle led to Taylor Autry’s career as an ER doc

If Taylor Autry had never broken his ankle during a high school soccer game when he was 15, he might never have become a doctor.

Autry has been an emergency medicine doctor at Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital for seven years. He grew up in St. Charles and went to St. Charles North High School.

“It was all very interesting,” Autry said of going to the emergency room for his ankle. “I used to tell my parents I was going to be an orthopedic surgeon and go to Stanford. Then I got the boot off [the foot] and got my driver’s license.”

As it turned out, Autry said he didn’t like anything so much in medicine that he wanted to dedicate his life to bones or cardiology or oncology.

Instead, the emergency room beckoned.

It fit what he called a “strange personality” to be an ER doc.

“You have to have a strange personality with a weird sense of humor to be able to brush off a little bit of the terribleness you see to continue on day to day,” Autry said. “There is inner turmoil. My stomach is turning. My mind is racing.”

You wouldn’t know it to look at him. As the team leader, he maintains a sense of calmness and everybody else is a little calmer.

“People are not angry. Nobody’s yelling. People are thinking a little clearer and are not afraid to bring things up or concerns,” Autry said. “There is no fear of getting talked down to. ... I do think that having a sense of calmness helps everybody.”

When Autry got out of his residency in 2018, he worked as a contract doctor and traveled to emergency rooms across the country.

“You have to have a strange personality with a weird sense of humor to be be able to brush off a little bit of the terribleness you see to continue on day to day.”

—  Dr. Taylor Autry, emergency medicine, Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital

In four years, he worked at 18 hospitals in Ohio, Kentucky, Florida, Washington, D.C., Illinois and South Carolina.

“There was no [COVID-19] and no kids,” Autry said. ”I was living out of airports and in the back of taxi cabs.”

Then he met his wife. The pandemic happened. They decided to have a baby and traveling was not fun anymore.

They lived in Chicago. All of his wife’s family lived in St. Charles.

“City [of Chicago] life was over,” Autry said.

He called a friend at Delnor, who said there was an opening and he could have an interview the next day. Autry got the job and they moved.

“The biggest thing is the people, my coworkers,” Autry said of working in the emergency room. “We are all similar personalities. ... If we lived in the neighborhood, I would be good friends with these people.”

Autry credited the rest of the ER staff – the technicians, registration, nurses, certified nursing assistants, advanced practice nurses – with making the job possible.

“You can’t do the job without the colleagues and coworkers. They have the most contact with the patient and the family,” Autry said. “They deal with vomiting, bowel movements, all down-and-dirty things not done as much by physicians. ... I owe that all to them. They are the rock of the emergency room, basically.”

Dr. Steven Coker, medical director of the Emergency Department, said Autry cares about the people of the community.

“Dr. Autry is very hardworking,” Coker said. “He is very compassionate with his patients and very knowledgable about emergency medicine.”