Man's Paramedic Experiences Result in Book

Clint Cooper - Chattanooga Times

A three-story fall off a distillation tank in South Texas couldn't eliminate the want-to in David Rex Garner's emergency-responder soul, but his employer couldn't take a chance on him being injured again.

So while he had to hang up his uniform, he couldn't eliminate from his psyche the ups and downs of 25 years as a fireman, emergency technician and paramedic.

Now, with the help of a Dayton, Tenn., clinical audiologist and magazine writer, he has written a book chronicling his escapades.

"Texas Medic," written by Mr. Garner and edited by Margie Littell Ullrich, the owner of Better Hearing Center, will be published by PublishAmerica in March. It is expected to be available in most local bookstores.

"His stories are so good, and he has such a sense of humor," said Ms. Ullrich. "And you can see a caring human being underneath."

Mr. Garner, whose nickname is "Cappy," said good emergency responders must love what they do. In the field, he said, responders are often confronted by the best and worst in people.

He has had people "fall in love" with him following a rescue and others "threaten his life" because they thought he was responsible for their accident, he said.

On Mr. Garner's first childbirth call, he said, the child was stillborn but he remained with the couple throughout their ordeal. The next day, the father told Mr. Garner he wanted him present for the birth of a future child.

As it turned out, one of Mr. Garner's students was there for the couple's next child, who was born healthy.

On another occasion, Mr. Garner said, the father of a girl he pulled from wreckage after she was run over by an 18-wheeler sought him out in the hospital and began writing him a check for $25,000 because his daughter had survived. Ethics rules forced him to decline the gift, he said.

Emergency responders don't count their wins and losses, he said.

"After you deliver a patient, once they're in the care of someone else, you go back to your crewmen," Mr. Garner said. "You never find out the final status. If you do (and it's negative), it'll haunt you."

He saw enough negative outcomes, he said, to make an impression.

His first call was a crash between a truck and a train, he said, and he wasn't prepared for what he found.

"The guy in the truck didn't look like anything from classroom days," he said. "(In the classroom), there was no blood. I did what every responder should do. I went behind the ambulance and cried."

In his first save, Mr. Garner said, he was working part-time in a chemical plant when someone had a heart attack. Following the procedures he'd been taught, he alternated mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with chest compressions. Once the ambulance arrived with a portable ventilation device, he squeezed it once into the man's mouth.

When the man came to immediately and pushed the bag away from his face, the responder whispered to him, "Bub, you've had a heart attack. Let me know if you can hear me."

With that, he remembers with a laugh, the victim made an obscene gesture at him.

"I still get a Christmas card from him," Mr. Garner said.

During part of the time he was an emergency responder, he also worked for the Texas Council of Governments, establishing eight emergency medical programs in small towns. He said he has taught CPR to than 4,000 people and shown more than 2,000 people how to operate a state ambulance.

"You do it because you like it," Mr. Garner said.

The Texas native met Ms. Ullrich several years ago through an Internet chat room on Great Britain. After the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, he was moved to write about one of his experiences as a first responder, which he sent to the Tennessee woman.

"I was blown away," she said. "He had such a way with words. I edited it and sent it back and told him he needed to write a book. He kept putting (his stories) on the computer until I got a bunch of them."

Later, visiting Ms. Ullrich in Tennessee, he fell in love with the state and, eventually, with a Tennessee woman. Today, the two are married and live in Beersheba Springs in Grundy County, where a mountain is named after his wife's family.

"I love Tennessee," he said. "I love the people, but I still get goosebumps when an ambulance goes by."

----

More book news