As if fire recruit training isn’t grueling enough, David Emery did it in the midst of donating a kidney to his 2-year-old daughter.
“I had the transplant on a Thursday and was back to training on Monday,” said Emery, one of the Winston-Salem Fire Department’s newest recruits. “Luckily, we were doing EMT training at the time, so I just had to be careful.”
The taxing six-month training regimen for fire recruits included 1,200 hours of EMT basic skills, fire school, rescue skills and instruction on handling hazardous materials, among other things.
Emery — one of 15 graduates at the Winston-Salem Fire Department’s ceremony Friday — left work as an attorney after his daughter, Alina, got progressively sicker over a period of 15 months.