After 55 years of service to Pleasureville and Henry County through his fire and rescue first responder commitment, Rodney Young of Pleasureville wasn’t ready to stop serving his community.
“I just got out of bed and couldn’t walk,” said Young, who turns 82 in May and also has served as Mayor of Pleasureville for the past 46 years.
The unexpected awakening for Young late last year forced him to retire from the Pleasureville Fire Department, whose volunteers honored him with an event in January at the fire station that the department dedicated in his name in 2017 when he reached 50 years of service.
His sudden debilitation also forced him to halt his long run as an EMT, which included the past four years as a “pro re nata” as needed, part-time professional in Henry County with Baptist Health La Grange EMS service.
“I’m an EMT until the end of December,” Young mentioned with a smile.
While Young is no longer active with the fire department or EMS, he continues to serve as Mayor of Pleasureville, presiding at Pleasureville City Commission meetings initially with the help of his wife Linda to get to City Hall and a walker to get to his chair but, now, on his own again once he resumed driving. While Young no longer uses the walker, he does have a cane that he was told would be a part of his long-term recovery.
“One year to 18 months with a cane, if not forever keeping it,” said Young. “I’m walking without it. It’s in the car.”
That determination to regain his independence has served Young well in dealing with his condition that he said required six months and three neurologists to diagnose — acute flaccid myelitis (AFM). The potentially debilitating condition affects the spinal cord to cause sudden loss of feeling and use of limbs. Young said he was told the condition is rare for adults.
“One-in-a-million in the United States,” he said. “Aren’t I lucky?”
During his rehabilitation, Young has made his own luck with the help of medical professionals who have guided his steps back to his former self from the time of his original admission to Norton’s Brownsboro Hospital to his subsequent acute physical and occupational therapy with Baptist Health and ultimately his weekly visits to Baptist Health La Grange to continue his improvement.
For his own part, Young recounted the medical circumstances that led up to his sudden debilitation.
“When we took the covid shots, six months later I had a little problem with my heart,” he said, adding that afterwards he contracted covid and then had a flu shot that preceded his sudden debilitation by two weeks.
While Young said the connection between his medical circumstances prior to his debilitation and the AFM condition that overcame him is indefinite, he further stated that he received medical advice that recommended no more covid boosters or flu shots out of caution to prevent risk of the return of AFM debilitation.
With his recovery well in the works, Young plans to continue serving as mayor. The half-century of his fire department and EMT service now seems concluded, though, leaving his legacy in Pleasureville and the Henry County community through his works.
“I guess you got to love what you do, really,” Young said of his longevity. “You got to care about people and go on all the runs that you can and not pick and choose.”
Young also encouraged communities to support their fire departments in the ongoing effort to recruit volunteers and keep serviceable equipment at the ready for response.
“Support them, that’s all I know to do,” he said. “It’s hard with such a county. Henry County doesn’t have the funds like La Grange or Shelby County has.”
Mayor Young supported the fire department in his official capacity as mayor last year to help secure funding for the new $340,000 fire engine that the city and fire department bought to upgrade their apparatus fleet.
Chief Matt Woods of the Pleasureville Fire Department said the new engine adds to the department’s available apparatus that includes a 25-year-old fire engine, a 26-year-old pumper tanker, a 2018 rescue rig and a field unit. Woods said the department had the first fire engine the city ever had up until about two years ago, a 1959 model.
“We just didn’t have the funds or the means to restore it,” Woods said.
Woods has served as fire chief since 2018 and also served as a volunteer EMT along with Young starting in 1999 when Pleasureville had an EMS service of its own.
“I ran with him until about 2012,” Woods said, adding that members of his family had also served with Young over the decades.
Another emergency response colleague of Young’s is Bobby Burnett of Campbellsburg, with whom he worked for Baptist Health La Grange for the past four years until Young suffered his debilitation. Their work together, however, goes back farther than that.
“We made many a run together. We made many when we were both volunteers,” Young said, also mentioning that Burnett had served as EMT recertification instructor for himself and others.
For Young, his half-century-plus of emergency response service has come in the place he calls home. He recalled that he attended the last class at Bethlehem school in the mid-1950s before the school burned down, then he went to school in Pleasureville starting in the seventh grade there.
Young eventually left the area to pursue his career but returned in the late 1960s to work in banking in Pleasureville at the current site of Peoples Bank when predecessors Central Bank and PBI Bank operated there.
