“Why do you have to go?” It’s a question every working
spouse and parent dreads.
Rodney Young, MD, has heard it before. His career-long
involvement with the Texas Medical Association, Texas Academy of Family
Physicians, the American Medical Association, and others has pulled him away
from his family in Amarillo on a semi-regular basis for nearly 30 years.
But thanks to a special companion, his daughters’ youth was
marked with a different question: Where’s Ellie going?
Ellie is a stuffed yellow dinosaur, plucked from an airport
claw machine in the ’90s while then-resident Dr. Young waited on a delayed
flight to a TMA meeting. At first, the toy was a travel keepsake for his wife,
Shelly, back home. But after their daughters were born, Dr. Young had an idea: If
Ellie came along on his excursions, the kids could share in the adventure of
medicine, and work trips would become exciting voyages for their prehistoric
pal.
“The concept of a traveling dinosaur that was able to be a
part of my activities – it became a pathway for me to explain to my whole
family, my kids in particular, why I had to be gone, what Ellie and I were
going to do,” Dr. Young recalled.
More than 20 years later, Ellie has unofficially joined Dr.
Young on the TMA Board of Trustees, sits in on council meetings, attends CME,
and keeps up with the House of Delegates (though not a credentialed voter
herself). Her photos remind Dr. Young’s family that he’s thinking of them, and they
illustrate the magnitude of the work he feels called to undertake.
“I didn’t come to medical school thinking I wanted to be
involved in advocacy and public policy,” Dr. Young said. “But you learn pretty
quickly that these are important things people need to think about, be mindful
of, and tend to. And if not me, then who?”
By the end of his residency, Dr. Young had become “fairly
enamored of the idea of having an impact” and resolved to keep working to
improve the health of all Texans. But nothing matters more than keeping his
family close, he says, citing the adage, “No amount of success at work makes up
for failure at home.”
“You can’t prioritize your professional life and work life
above your family,” Dr. Young said, a sentiment he shares with the family
medicine department at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center at Amarillo,
which he leads. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t be engaged in excellence as a
physician, or that you can’t participate.”
Dr. Young encourages rising physicians to find their own
ways to involve their families in medicine’s mission. Doing so can energize
physicians to tackle big challenges and help them stay engaged when setbacks
occur, he says.
“People have an impression of organizations like TMA, AMA,
and others, that ‘it’s too big for me, that it’s for more important people,’”
he said. “It isn’t too big for you. Not only is it not too big, it depends on
you.”
But
that responsibility can’t be carried alone, he adds. “Whether you pluck a
dinosaur out of an airport claw machine or any little thing that's meaningful,”
letting loved ones join the journey is “a pretty powerful tool.”