| A Remarkable Team | ||||||
| It would be impressive enough to introduce Greg Fuller as a medical doctor who directs two emergency rooms in Wayne County, Michigan. But Fuller is also a police officer who handles specially trained dogs in search and rescue. The two careers complement each other nicely; both have saving lives as their primary purpose.
As the medical director of Emergency Medicine Consultants, a firm that supplies doctors to emergency rooms and supervises emergency medical services for the county, Fuller is busy enough. But he has a second (albeit part-time) career as a police officer that was born as a result of a tragedy. There was a drowning in a lake nearby his home, and officers were having a difficult time recovering the body. Knowing that there are dogs trained for this kind of water rescue and recovery, Fuller decided to get involved. Enter Tosca: a 4-year-old malinois, fully trained in search and rescue and police patrol with narcotics detection. When Tosca arrived on the scene as a generous donation to the community, she needed special K-9 training, so Fuller decided to take on the job at his own expense. Fuller says, "I went to training with her to do narcotics detection and patrol work, and I crossed-trained her to do body recovery, especially in water." But if he wanted to handle Tosca on the job, Fuller had to become a police officer. So he did.
Fuller made three separate trips to ground zero. Since he was a physician, he was asked to help identify bones and body parts in the debris taken to Staten Island by transport vehicles. On his last trip, he and Tosca were recognized with an award. "The city of New York couldn’t have been nicer," Fuller says, "For a situation that depressing -- they made it tolerable." As a result of Tosca's success in New York City, Emergency Medicine Consultants donated two more dogs for use by the police department in Wayne County - another malinois and a blue heeler.
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