Dr. Anthony Youn

Like I was going to be either a neurosurgeon, a cardiac surgeon, you know, a transplant surgeon, one of these like high powered surgical specialties.

And pretty quickly as I was in medical school, I realized that this was not my personality.

The day that I saw a 60-year-old man stumble out of a call room in the middle of the night to attend to a trauma, I was like, I don't want to be that guy.

And then even throughout all my training, I did three years of general surgery training where I trained as a general surgeon, and you're working the ICUs, you're working in trauma bays.

I was just honestly deathly afraid that one of my patients would die and it would be my fault.

And so it always stressed me out.

And luckily, I went through all my training and nobody did.

I mean, people died, but it wasn't because I didn't do something.

And so I realized very quickly that that just wasn't for me.

And so I ended up finding the field of plastic surgery, which really talked to me a lot.

The interesting thing is I initially thought I was going to do family practice for a while.

So I'm like, I don't want to be with this type of surgeon.

Maybe I'll do family practice and work with families and stuff.

And my dad was not approving of that at all.

So, yeah, but I was like the middle child.

So I was the dutiful middle child.

You tell me to do something and I'll do it.

But, you know, for him, he grew up on a rice farm in Korea with six other siblings and he became a doctor.

They put all their resources into him and then he literally lifted his whole family up out of poverty.

And he brought half of them here to the United States where they kind of now are living the American dream.