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E-mail StoryHerb Benham: Physical therapist and polio survivor offers help and inspiration
| Monday, Jul 7 2008 12:00 PM
Last Updated: Monday, Jul 7 2008 2:17 PM
If you have a stroke, God forbid, or a heart attack or you tumble in the shower and break your hip and you end up under Art Garcia’s care, I would suggest avoiding saying the following things:
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Art Garcia helps Franklin Stewart during physical therapy at HealthSouth, Bakersfield Rehabilitation Hospital. Garcia has worked at HealthSouth for more than 15 years.
Art Garcia was stricken with polio as a child and overcame a series of obstacles to walk again.
Art Garcia works with a physical therapy patient at HealthSouth.
“Why me?”
“I can’t walk across the room.”
“I’ll never get better.”
Better to avoid words like “never,” “can’t,” and “won’t.”
With Garcia as your physical therapist assistant, giving up is not an option. Nor is feeling sorry for yourself.
Why? Well, if illness has not struck the questioner blind, then the answer stands in front of him. Garcia, in the flesh, is both your answer and your inspiration.
Look at him. If the kindness in his eyes doesn’t move you to have a come-to-Jesus moment, how about the fact that he is barely 5 feet tall and he drags his right leg because it’s fused.
Garcia, 59, was born in Mexico City and was struck with polio when he was 2 — contracting it one year before the vaccine was developed (his brother, a doctor, ended up working with Jonas Salk). He was in an iron lung two times. Doctors told his parents he would never walk.
As sometimes happens when somebody uses the word “never,” coupled with the phrase, “iron lung,” Garcia, with several assists, spent his life proving that he could.
He moved to Fresno when he was 10. Garcia received help from the Crippled Children’s Association and underwent two surgeries with Dr. Edward Hilderbrand, a man he says saved his life and allowed him to do what he’s doing. This has included graduating from Fresno State, becoming a physical therapist assistant, being married for nine years to Rose, coaching both of his son’s baseball, football and soccer teams, being an assistant Scout leader and founding an amputee support group in Bakersfield.
“When I was training to become a physical therapist, I worked in a hospital in Fresno,” Garcia said. “One day they brought in a woman who had had a terrible stroke. Minutes later Dr. Hilderbrand came in (the doctor who had done his original surgeries).
“He hugged me and said, ‘I took care of you as a child and now you are taking care of my wife.’”
Patients call him “Little Sarge,” or “softie,” reflecting the combination of firmness tempered with encouragement that Garcia employs. After staying at hospitals down south, Bakersfield patients who later are assigned to HealthSouth, Bakersfield Rehabilitation Hospital, often ask, “Is Art still there?”
When assured that, after 16 years, he’s still there, they might say, “Then I’ll go see him.”
Garcia has one of those attitudes that you can either embrace or resent depending on what side of the bed you wake up on.
“I love my job,” he says. “I am able to watch people get better.”
Most do. Maybe they don’t end up being a threat in the Olympic trials, but many accomplish more than they thought they could. They feel better than they did when they limped in the door.
“I like giving back what was given to me when I couldn’t walk,” Garcia said.
“Couldn’t” became could. Now, Garcia walks proudly, stiff leg be damned. And his patients, as best they can, walk behind him.
Opinions expressed are those of Herb Benham, not The Californian.