Fighting For Life: How Monica Young Beat The Odds
Luke Bennett, umterps.com Contributor
7/9/2021
Here’s the deal: You’re given a 2 percent chance to live. You can resign yourself to the odds and spare yourself the misery and uncertainty your future invariably holds. Or, you can fight like hell, advocating for yourself through unfathomable pain and doubt just for the chance to roll the dice and pray that you will be one of the 2 percent.
Monica Young chose to fight like hell.
As a former Maryland softball star, Monica Young, née Cyphert, a member of the class of 2004, and a mother of four is by far the oldest recipient of the award. Which begs the question: How’d she end up here?
One night after putting her kids to bed, Young opened up the scholarship application and “poured her heart out” about all of her experiences confronting these struggles head-on within the last year and how her time at Maryland was – and still remains – paramount to her recovery.
Young’s journey began during a time many consider the happiest in their lives – childbirth. However, after her fourth and youngest child, Brooks was set to be born ten weeks prematurely, Young underwent an emergency C-section.
Brooks was immediately transferred to the Natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in Annapolis for indefinite medical oversight. However just days after her discharge, Young began developing troubling symptoms that would also keep her in the hospital. It was then when her youngest child was only seven days old when she was dealt her future.
The doctors told her that necrotizing fasciitis – a life-threatening, flesh-eating bacterial infection – had spread after her emergency C-section. She would need immediate surgery, blood transfusions, and antibiotics. She sat with her husband Adam to reflect, unable to say goodbye to her children, before going into an operating room that she knew she may never come out of again.
“There was no way I was giving up that fight and succumbing to the infection,” Young said. “My thought was: If I can make it through the first surgery, I can make it through anything. If I can make it through this one, I can do the next.”
Monica Young was determined to be in the 2 percent.
As a nurse, Young once cared for a patient who succumbed to necrotizing fasciitis. Despite her own battle, Young plowed her way through the only way she knew how. She successfully endured multiple surgeries for the better part of a month and endured a stringent series of rehabilitation and wound care for the next three months. And by the time she could see the light at the end of the tunnel, her fight was so tiring that she was almost unable to recall how she made it through in the first place.
“It’s something you can’t even explain,” Young said. “Because it is so easy to just give up. There were a few times that I felt like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. Make this end. Make it all go away.’ But every time I had to find something within me to keep going and make it through.”
The more she talks herself through it, the more Young connects the dots between her time at Maryland and her ability to overcome such a morbid diagnosis.
What about every lifting practice or stadium stairs run when Young told herself, “there’s no way I can run another stair,” or, “there’s no way I can do another rep,” yet somehow found the mettle to do it every time? How about the composure and grit needed when your team is relying on a strikeout in the bottom of the last inning? And could the maturity and discipline needed to excel in academics and athletics while sucking every drop of fun out of your college experience also help prepare you in the face of possible death? For Young, the answer was a resounding yes.
“That was the best decision I ever made coming to Maryland,” Young said. “Those experiences never go away. I think about them daily and how they’ve made me the person I am today…Those things I learned and practiced at Maryland helped me really say, ‘there’s no way I’m losing this fight.’”
Young’s battle with necrotizing fasciitis mirrors her time playing softball at Maryland. Even as an All-ACC First Team performer, Young credits her teammates and coaches for her success. Now, she was forced to shift gears and lean on a new supporting cast: her community and her family.
But in conquering such trauma, Young experienced an identity change that wasn’t so easy to deal with.
“It’s hard to take that new role,” Young said. “Being a pitcher, being a leader, you feel like you have to do everything for everybody else, and especially as a mom. And now, you are sitting back and watching. So, it was a completely different role.”
For a woman who had grown so accustomed to controlling her own destiny – and in many cases, her team’s – Young was forced to deal with the sharp learning curve of her new day-to-day life and physical capabilities. Her health, often in the hands of doctors, surgeons, and therapists. Her ability to parent or provide for her children, suppressed and, for months, eliminated. Her opportunity to work, nurse, or lead Kent Island’s youth softball program scaled down dramatically. Still, Young shows nothing but appreciation and thankfulness for what she does have.
“It’s incredible how you realize that life can be taken away in the blink of an eye,” Young said. “You realize how short life can be. You never take for granted the little things – the kisses, the hugs. I make those things a little more obvious now.”
To fully appreciate how Monica Young is able to look forward, it is imperative to look to the past.
In 2003, Young – then named Monica Cyphert – was highlighted in Maryland’s “Up Close and Personal” series. Among many things, she was asked what she would like to accomplish after her time at Maryland. Her response: “After Maryland, I'd like to: go to nursing school, move by a beach with warm weather, be a nurse, get married and live happily ever after…”
Eighteen years later, even after weathering an unimaginable storm of suffering, Monica Young never lost sight of what she wanted to accomplish. She now lives in Stevensville, Maryland on Kent Island and is surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay waters that she always dreamt of. She is married to her husband Adam, and they have one daughter and three sons, including a happy and healthy Brooks.
Now, with the M Club scholarship helping cover the final classes that will earn her a bachelor’s degree at Walden University, Young can say that her dreams have undoubtedly come true.
“Don’t ever give up on anything that you dream to be,” Young said. “There’s always peaks and valleys in life. And when you’re in your valley, never give up. Because you can always overcome it.”
