Not long ago, another series of reports were issued showing that Nevadans don't fare well when it comes to access to quality medical care.

Active physicians per 100,000 population? Nevada now ranks 45th. Primary care physicians? The Silver State ranks 48th. What about mental health? Only four out of 10 Nevadans with mental illness are receiving care. How about medical specialists? For nearly every specialty or subspecialty, Nevada has fewer specialists than the U.S. rate.

While recent population gains – in 2020 the state’s population hit 3.1 million, an increase of more than a million people (52%) since 2000 – have exacerbated the lack of medical access, to many Nevadans, the predicament still only means having to wait longer for an appointment.

Courtney Thornton, a third-year student at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV, knows better. Lack of access to proper quality medical care, she says, can mean the difference between life and death.

In 1997, when Thornton was just 3 years old, her 3-week-old sister, Taylor, was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer usually affecting children under age 5 that develops in nerve tissue. At the time, Thornton said Las Vegas pediatric oncologists said there was nothing they could do to save her life.

“Doctors told my parents to spend as much remaining time with my sister as they could because they were sure she was going to die,” Thornton says.

Thornton’s maternal grandmother, who didn’t appreciate the fatalistic attitude shared by local physicians, decided to see if she could find help for her granddaughter. “Grandma was always a force to be reckoned with, so she started cold calling the nation’s top children’s hospitals until someone agreed to treat Taylor.”

That hospital turned out to be the Mayo Clinic Children's Center in Minnesota.

David and Susan Thornton, shocked by their youngest daughter’s fatal cancer diagnosis, quickly decided to move with their four young girls to Rochester, Minnesota, with all six members of the family often staying in one room at the local Ronald McDonald House Charity. “My dad had to fly back and forth for months, but he’d generally be on hand for the treatments,” Thornton says. “My parents definitely had money concerns back then.”

At the time, Courtney Thornton says her father owned a gift shop in Meadows Mall and a gas station in Mesquite, and her mother worked in public relations for Nevada Energy. Her mother took a leave from her job, and her co-workers pooled their unused vacation for her to use. Both of Thornton’s parents are now flight attendants for Southwest Airlines.

“I grew up very modestly, but our family was still fortunate enough to have the connections and means to get care elsewhere,” says Thornton.

Today, Taylor Thornton is in remission and celebrating her 26th birthday this year.

Courtney Thornton says she remembers much of her time at the Ronald McDonald House and Mayo Clinic, despite her youth at the time.

“At each of my sister’s appointments, I stood on tiptoe to peek over the examination table as doctors evaluated her, absorbing every word of their assessment. When she started treatments, I was given a doll marked up with surgical scars, a Hickman catheter, and drainage tubes. The doctors used the doll to show me how they were going to perform each procedure and encouraged me to demonstrate it back to them. As I treated my doll, I was reassured by their explanations and confident the doctors would take the same care and precision with my sister as I did with my doll. The more I learned about my sister’s cancer and her impaired immune system, the stronger I felt I had a responsibility to protect her. I looked up to the physicians and how they put me at ease. Having this close, daily interaction with them cultivated my curiosity for learning about human health and opened the door to see myself as a future physician.”

Science courses at Valley High School in Las Vegas and at Thornton’s undergraduate alma mater, Concordia University in California, coupled with her grandfather’s battle with Lewy body dementia (LBD) during her teenage years, further convinced her to pursue a career in medicine.

“I read every study of LBD I could find, devouring the pages as if my own life depended on it,” Thornton says. “I ambitiously thought if I found the right study and asked the right questions I would discover a solution and he would be cured. After observing how caring the neurology team was to my grandpa’s well-being, I devoted myself to follow a similar path in medicine.”

Now exploring various specialties during the clinical rotations that are part of a student’s third year of medical school, Thornton says she’d be lying if she said she has lost interest in neurology. “I can't help but consider some sort of neurological speciality when it was such a large part of my past and continues to be a presence in the lives of my family and friends.”

While Thornton says she has enjoyed medical school, she admits that it’s important to find ways to deal with the stress that comes with learning a large amount of information in a relatively short period of time. Being active outdoors helps her mellow out. “There is just something very refreshing about being outside, and it’s a great reset for me whenever I am stressed, overwhelmed, or just feeling off. The best sleep I get is after a day of being outside.”

Thornton says she hopes the entrance of Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine students into the medical field will one day play a role in relieving the kind of stress her parents suffered when there were no physicians locally to help her sister.

“Access to care in Las Vegas remains a huge problem,” she says. “Las Vegas is making some strides in care, but is still not keeping up with the demand. We must do better. More residencies (graduate medical education) and fellowships in more specialties in Nevada can go a long way toward dealing with the problem.”