When now Dr. Rebecca Young was just 12 years old, she started competitively swimming.
She spent hours upon hours at the pool.
“One thing I always remember is the work ethic,” Young said. “I don’t know if that’s something that’s taught or it’s something you’re born with and it just kind of brings it out of people, but I think swimming is a really underrated sport in that like, what other sport — maybe gymnastics — has 13 practices a week, two hour practices, an extra three hours on Saturday. Like, nobody else does that.”
Not only did swimming teach Young how to work hard, it also taught her about setting goals and how to reach them. Plus, most importantly now as Young is the newest general surgeon at Russell Medical, swimming taught her how to perform under pressure.
“The other thing that really applies to surgery is just holding up under pressure,” Young said. “You put in all this work then it’s the big meet and it’s go time. You only get one race and if you don’t make the cut, you don’t come back. There’s some pressure that comes along with that both external and internal.”
Young grew up in Montgomery and swam for Trinity before swimming collegiately at Vanderbilt in Nashville. She then attended South Alabama for medical school. She did her surgical training in New Orleans before landing her first permanent job in Alexander City.
Growing up in a family of physicians, Young knew she was always attracted to the medical field but it wasn’t until medical school she knew she wanted to go into surgery.
She shadowed a few of her parents’ friends, who just happened to be surgeons. She said it was on her third day of surgical rotation she knew that was her calling.
“I did some shadowing in college, and I thought it was so cool,” Young recalled. “But I really did try to keep an open mind in medical school. But it hit me my third day of my surgery rotation. We were just in the middle of a case and I was like, ‘This is just too cool. I don’t know why anybody would do anything else.’”
Going into surgery requires a bit of extra training, which is why Young’s residency was five years instead of the typical three. But now, she is ready to hit the ground running as she started at Russell Medical in February.
One thing she hopes to bring is a complement to Dr. Lacey Swenson, Russell Medical’s other general surgeon. While Swenson does a lot of her surgeries on the DaVinci robot, Young prefers the old school way of laparoscopic surgery.
“Basically that means it’s multiple tiny incisions like you would have with the robot,” Young explained, “but instead of the robot, it’s uses long, tiny instruments to take stuff out that way. It’s really good for simple procedures.”
Some examples are gallbladder surgery and appendix removal. With Swenson and Young using different equipment, that means more surgeries can be done at a faster rate.
“I think that’s one of the things they were thinking about when they recruited me,” Young said. “Dr. Swenson utilizes the robot, which is wonderful. We have it and we want it to be used, but they also had all this lab equipment that they were like, ‘Well, we should get somebody to use that.’ I just prefer the laparoscopic way.”
