From GED to MD: MUSC med student inspires others to pursue dreams against all odds

At age 11 when most kids wrestle with the decision of what sport to play, Domnique Newallo was deciding which gang to join.

Newallo, now 34 and a medical student at the Medical University of South Carolina, talks frankly about her past. Admittedly headstrong, she was raised by her grandmother and a single mom, who often was deployed in the military. She did the best she could.

“That’s when I started losing my mind and got gang-affiliated. In Detroit, the kids were hanging outside, and that’s just what everybody did. At 12, I’m selling drugs and don’t even know what I’m selling. That’s when I got arrested my first time for grand larceny. At 13 is when I started running away and was homeless for a while.”

Newallo spent nine months homeless and then got caught and placed into a series of group and foster homes. At age 15, she became pregnant and ended up at Florence Crittenton Home in Charleston.

“I never thought I’d be here,” she says recently, overlooking the front lawn of MUSC where she’s in her fourth year as a medical student. “Absolutely not. You know what? Tomorrow, the child that I gave birth to at this hospital at the age of 16, tomorrow, he will be 18 years old. Never would have thought it. From GED to M.D. I was in group homes, foster homes, gangs. My son saved me from myself in a sense. I was crazy in a sense and acting the fool.”

Her struggle was far from over, though.

Newallo ended up in a group home in Andrews. She managed to get her GED and went to Benedict College for a year. She missed her son, who was with her mother, and wanted to get him back, so she joined the military in June 2000. “That’s when I got thrown into radiology.”

Placement testing suggested X-ray technology would be a good field for her. “I said, please, I can’t do that crap. They are sitting in a reading room. They stink. They look tired. That’s too much school. I said, ‘never,’ and here I am.”

Newallo learned never to say never. She also discovered she loved radiology.

“I liked what I was doing. CAT scans were getting so much cooler. Radiology has changed so much over the years. It went from regular films to 3-D images of blood vessels. The technology advances in imaging in the past 10 years have just gotten cooler and cooler.”

Battling setbacks

Newallo, who had married, decided to leave the military in 2004 and join her husband in Maryland. She had a medical discharge for a back injury she got in a car accident. When she gave birth to her second son, T.J., he came four weeks premature and they had to spend weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit.

“He was a little, three-pound guy. He has cerebral palsy,” she says, bragging about a special needs basketball practice he had last weekend and that all the therapy has gotten him to the point he can walk independently. Having a child with a disability was tough, though, she recalls.

One of her lowest points came in 2006 when she decided to divorce and move to Atlanta to be closer to her mother. She had a part-time job as an X-ray technician, but had to spend a lot of time taking her son to therapy appointments. When the market took a downturn, she was laid off. Her car was close to being repossessed, and her grandmother, a source of support, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Life just wasn’t going well, and I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about life or what I did,” she recalls. Then she got another job and a fresh start.

“I finally just got sick and tired of being sick and tired. Radiology became my outlet. I would go to work, and I would love helping patients because it was one-on-one.”

She recalls a woman who had a hip fracture, and she had to help her stand up. “She said, ‘Thank you for being my strength when I’m at my weakest.’ I thought, oh my God, this is great. This is what I want to do.”

She just wasn’t sure what her path should be since she wanted to do more than “push buttons.” Newallo was working for Piedmont Hospital when a radiologist in cardiac imaging liked the questions she was asking. He asked her if she knew what she was viewing. Having some spare time, he asked her to take a seat. He explained some of the medical details.

Later, Newallo attended a 3-D cardiac imaging conference in 2008 to earn continuing education credits. “I realized what I was interested in were the sessions the radiologists were in. The stuff for the techs was cool, but I was falling asleep. I sat there and thought, ‘I could do that.’”

She had no idea what all that would require, which probably is a good thing, she says, smiling. Applying to Spelman College in January 2009, she arranged for her ex-husband to care for T.J., and her mother helped with her older son, Ryan.

“I started lining things up.”

Medical School

During her first exam in medical school, Newallo reached out to Joseph Schoepf, M.D., who was her mentor and who directs cardiovascular imaging at MUSC. He is recognized as one of the top 10 cardiovascular imagers worldwide and as one of the most influential radiology researchers in the nation. She was interested in research, particularly in minority and female issues, and he had just the project for her.

Women get mammograms routinely, some even have them annually, she says. The question was how to better detect coronary heart disease, which is called a silent killer for women because they can have vague complaints and seemingly unrelated symptoms, such as migraines, and they don’t get checked out.

The interesting tie is that women who have more breast calcifications on their mammograms also tend to be at higher risk for coronary artery disease (CAD). “So we found if you have calcifications in the breast, you also may have calcifications in the blood vessels in the heart.”

This was of particular interest to Newallo since prior research showed that African-American women have greater mortality – almost 70 percent higher – than their white counterparts.

The project would become a research paper that would be presented at MUSC’s Research Day and subsequently at the European Council of Radiology’s young physicians section at an international conference in 2014. Newallo says Schoepf was an incredible mentor. “He does so much for medical students as far as research and for his patients in general. He wants to make an impact. He genuinely cares.”

The respect is mutual.

Schoepf said he’s always had students work with him and present at conferences.  What made Newallo unique was her commitment to her project as a first-year medical student. “You could tell her interest in the project was authentic, and she genuinely wanted to contribute to clinical research.”

From the first day he met her, he could tell she was excited to learn, and she was a team player, always willing to help others when needed. She was mature and attentive to details.

“We need more medical students like her because she had many qualities that are necessary to be a great physician. Domnique is a passionate, dedicated woman who is going to make a great doctor. Her dedication to the advancement of medicine is unique as a medical student.  Her compassionate nature and desire to provide service to all patients equally, regardless of their ethnicity, is a necessity when treating patients of various backgrounds. I would further describe her as professional, focused, selfless and resilient.”

Many of the world’s most significant challenges in health care will be met in the future by the next generation of providers, so Schoepf sees mentoring as a key role. He’s excited by students such as Newallo.

“I’m very proud of her, and I’m honored to watch as she’s grown through the years. I also am eager to witness her future growth in residency because I’m sure she’ll leave an impact at any program.”

Minority Perspective

Newallo says Schoepf helped ignite her passion for research. The project showed her how she could affect not just one patient, but many through a detailed study.

“I do have a passion for minorities and what is going on within their community with the health and social disparities that are going on. But in general, if I can do something that lessens the burden on the human body, then that’s what I want to do.”

When women get mammograms, radiologists may not comment on calcifications because they are common, and they aren’t cancerous, she explains. “But if these can be an indicator of coronary artery disease, then this is something that needs to be mentioned when women get their mammograms.”

If a woman does have them, then there may be benefits in monitoring the calcifications over time, and if there’s an increase, to have a physician review to see if the patient should be considered for a stress test or medication to prevent CAD, she says.

Newallo says it still amazes her that she was involved with a project that might change protocol in how patients are treated. Well on her way to becoming a physician, she could easily just leave her past behind. Instead she likes to share her real story.

“I think sharing my lows in this field is more helpful than sharing my highs. There are so many people in this field sharing their high moments. There are not many sharing their lows. People make excuses. I’ve run into people who have said, ‘Oh, I have these kids’ or ‘All I have is a GED.’ Man, please! I had a ninth-grade education. I barely knew algebra when I started at Spelman as a chemistry major.”

A lot of hard work enabled her to graduate magna cum laude as a chemistry major – just 0.1 of a point away from graduating summa cum laude.

“I wouldn’t change the struggles, the jail, the fighting. I wouldn’t change anything in my past. I give a different outlook because I can put myself into a patient’s shoes. I’ve been homeless. I’ve gone without eating,” she says, describing a time at Spelman College when people rallied around her to make sure she and her baby had meals.

Having to be resilient has helped her on her journey as a medical student and will make her a better physician, she thinks.

“I can relate to a lot of these patients. I can relate to a lot of their struggles and a lot of the adversity that they’ve gone through. Just a lot of trauma I’ve gone through in my life, I can give them that insight. And being a veteran and other things, I can bring a different perspective.”

Being headstrong got her in trouble when she was young, but now it’s helping her.

“If I didn’t get my way when I was younger, I was going to figure out a way to do it. That’s how it is now. That’s how it is now with my research. If I can’t figure it out, I won’t let it be. ‘Let me figure it out’ – that statement – that is important.”

Every day in medical school, she has told herself that she’s going to be a radiologist, no matter how hard it was, no matter how much she didn’t understand, no matter how close to failing she has gotten.

“I still said I’m going to be a radiologist,” she says.

“People say, ‘Oh, it’s just because you’re smart.’ No, everyone is smart. You just have to be willing to put in the effort to make things make sense. None of that stuff made sense to me at first. When I failed, I failed royally. If you really want something, you have to go after it. It’s never too late to be who you’re destined to be.”