From Deseret News archives:
Crisis reopens a door to music
Nothing Katie Young had gone through before had prepared her for that night last February.
Young's husband, Justin, said his wife woke up in pain — pain so intense that \"she felt like her abdomen was being ripped to shreds.\"
The Youngs had thought her health problems through the years were food allergies. But this was different.
Justin Young said his wife told him the pain was the worst she had ever felt — even worse than giving birth to their two children naturally. \"She's not one to go to the doctor,\" Young said, but he rushed her to the hospital. \"Sure enough, they admitted her, rushed her into surgery, (discovered a perforation) and then they diagnosed it as Crohn's disease,\" a chronic inflammation of the digestive tract.
__IMAGE1__Doctors removed about 10 inches of Katie Young's small intestine and a small portion of her large intestine, her husband said. They didn't have any health insurance because he \"had been job-hopping for a while. I got into real estate as soon as the market tanked, so I went to something else, a commission-only job, then I started applying to go back to school, and that's when this all came together.\"
Young, a member of the Salem Ward in the Virginia Beach (Virginia) Stake, credits the doctors with saving Katie Young's life. But with a mountain of unpaid medical bills, he had to find a way to pay them. That's when he decided to lean on his love of music and a CD that was recorded 10 years earlier.
Justin Young has always enjoyed entertaining. His mom had him start with piano lessons when he was 5. He liked it but dropped out later because various acting opportunities diverted him.
\"My schedule got busy — I became a professional actor, making money from it starting at age 10,\" he said.
\"It wasn't until I got into high school that I started discovering that, hey, I've got music in my head — let's see if I can play it.\" He found that he could.
When he went on a Mormon mission to the Denver South Mission (Spanish-speaking), he met a fellow Virginia elder, Chris Sorensen. Their meeting would lead to music collaboration and a friendship that continues to this day. \"When you find somebody that's from your home state when everyone else around you is from either California, Arizona, Utah and Idaho, you kind of gravitate towards them,\" Young said. \" He'd seen me play (the piano) at some zone conferences (and) he said, 'Do you actually write music?' And I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I have some lyrics that I want to put some music to.'
\"We sat down after one zone conference ... it was as if ... picture a beam of light coming down into the top of my head and not my fingers,
