I wanted to close the loop for anyone with a Lenovo laptop similar to mine. There was/is a pin hole on the bottom of my ThinkPad Yoga that allowed me to bypass the Recovery screen and get into the BIOS. I then changed the boot order in the BIOS so the USB drive was first (like it was previously and I'm still not sure if the updated caused this change or not). I was able to boot from the USB drive and then do "recovery" without any data loss or re-formatting of the hard drive. I did not know this feature existed so many others may not either.
Good luck to all who are still dealing with this issue.