Riding with Angels: Rural Ems

By Wayne Floyd

Imagine a small county in rural Western Kentucky with family farms, three grocery stores, one stoplight, one school system, a few gas stations, and a community of loving and hardworking people. This is Carlisle County. Now imagine that that someone is sick or injured and is in need of emergency medical treatment and the nearest hospital is thirty miles away. This type of setting and need is what drew me to serve the citizens of Carlisle County. I started my journey toward this destination many years ago. Yes, there were days of triumph, days of sorrow, and days that seemed to have no end. I know that all along this exodus, I had angels riding with me, for without them, I could not have possibly seen and experienced the many miracles God allowed me to witness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984516381

Wayne Floyd

I was born in Cape Girardeau Mo. I grew p n cotton farm in a commur~ity of Walnut Grove Tenn. This was about six miles from Rutherford Ten es ee, where I graduated High School. My father worked as a blacksmith ar1d along with my mother ar1 o e brother tried to keep everythir~g going. I loved the community I grew up in where everyone ne everybody and sometimes this was bad thing because boys get ir1to trouble and everybody tells on au. Life was good all except picking cotton by hand and I learned dedication and hard work ethics ro my dad. I worked at our local hospital as an orderly to make spending money on weekends and gu ss that's where I got the desire to help people. Upon graduation ftom high school! volu tee ed for the army and even then wanted to be a paramedic. As fate would deal the cards I hurt my kn e nd was shipped home. Later I went to Memphis and worked in the operating room as a techni ia for a while then moved to Dyer Tennessee to work for Goodyear Tire And Rubber Co. in Union C ty ennessee for the next seven years. Still there was the desire to help people and after long hard ho ght I decided to leave. I had two children and a wife that had just finished nursing school and she ad job offer at a hospital in Paducah Ky. So off we went and after some fail business adventured and di orce I decided to go back to school and become a paramedic and full fill a lifelong dream.

Book preview

Chapter 1

THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY

As I start to write this story, it’s hard to find the correct place, so I’ll just go back to the beginning of what I think you should know to put the hold thing in perspective.

In 1984 after fifteen years of what I thought was a fair to good marriage my wife decided to go another way, which she felt did not include me. After we agreed mutually that this was probably the best solution, I was divorced and on my own. At the time, the kids stayed with their mother and I was left to decide which way to go.

During my high school days, my mother worked in a small hospital in Trenton, Tennessee. In addition, she helped me get a job as an orderly. I dearly loved helping people and thought this would be a good career to pursue. Well upon graduation from high school in 1967, our country was deep into a conflict in Vietnam and several of my friends and two cousins were already over there I felt it my duty to enlist. I have one brother and he was married so he was out and I had no money to go to college. So I figured that if I made it home, I could go to school on the go bill. Sounded great but little did I know how that worked?

After talking with my local recruiter and explaining how I liked hospital work he invited me to become a medic in the army. He went on to tell how I would get to fly in helicopters and administer first aid to wounded men on the battlefield. This sounded great because that is just what I wanted to do. So here I went to Memphis Tennessee. After all the testing and physical training, they put me in the medic program, which due to the need was on a fast track.

I found out later that the average life expectancy in a hot landing zone for a medic was almost twenty-six minutes because the Vietcong used the cross on the helmet for a target. The Cong knew that taking out the medic meant the wounded would die sooner. Little did I know God had other plans for me.

Around six, that fourth day I was invited to get on board a bus headed for fort Campbell Kentucky. Now I had no idea where that was so on board I went and the only seat open was by a fine young black gentleman by the name of Benjamin Higgins, which would turn out to be a good friend.

Well, we got to know each other during our travel to Kentucky. As we were talking I found out he was the concierge at the famous Peabody hotel in Memphis Tennessee. I told ben about the time we was playing basketball at white haven and we always stayed at the Peabody when in town. I told him about my nickname in high school was big dog and some of the pranks we pulled while in the hotel.

I explained one time in particular about the famous ducks that came to the fountain inside the lobby and how we were impressed how they came down the elevator every morning and went back up later that day. We thought it would be fun to punch in a different floor to see what happened. Ben laughed and said you was the son-of –bitch that did that, you don’t know what a mess that made in the hotel and how they like to have never got the duck poo out of the carpet and getting the ducks corralled and back to the roof.

When we arrived about three a.m. A man got on board our bus and started yelling get your asses off this bus and line up against a building cause it was pouring rain and he didn’t want to get wet. So there we stood in rain holding a plate when a real short dude came by and placed a piece of bread covered in honey in it and smiled a rather evil smile and ben looked at me and said man we done gone to