Tammy Turner
It’s Never Too Late to be the Advocate
It was a warm day like any other in Colorado that summer. Tammy Turner was outside, chatting over the fence with her elderly neighbor while she kept a watchful eye on her eleven month old son, Rennick, as he played on a blanket nearby when, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Rennick crawling off the blanket. Just as she issued a warning for him to stay put, she noticed his little hand scooping something up from the ground and doing just what babies always do: he popped it in his mouth. Whatever it was, it was clearly unpleasant to him. Rennick made a face and gasped, and with that sudden inhalation, he swallowed it down into his throat and there, to Tammy’s horror, it stayed.
In a silence far more frightening than screams ever would have been, Rennick grasped at his tiny chest, his eyes wide with terror and his lips turning blue. This can’t be happening, Tammy thought frantically. She and her husband had lost seven pregnancies to be able to have their two children. After all that loss and suffering, after so many crushing disappointments, it just couldn’t be real that she was losing her youngest living child. Steeling herself with a deep breath, Tammy tried back blows and chest compressions in a desperate attempt to clear his airway while her neighbor called 911 and Tammy started CPR when he went unresponsive. The police were first on the scene, closely followed by the paramedics, who succeeded in extracting the feral cat feces that had gotten lodged in Rennick’s throat. Shaking uncontrollably from shock and relief, Tammy staggered over to the bushes and threw up. Nothing in her life had prepared her for what she had just been through.
Tammy and her sister grew up in the sheltered embrace of their conservative, Christian family in Colorado. The girls were not allowed to dance or go to movies. They did not have a TV to watch but even so, teenage Tammy dreamed of being a singer or an actress. When those dreams clashed with reality, she went to college to become a special needs teacher instead, a career she became disillusioned with as she saw overwhelming need consistently overwhelmed by insufficient resources. Tammy left school, moved out of state, and fell in love with a boy from home.
Back in Denver, they began building their lives together. Her husband wanted one child. Tammy wanted six. They compromised on two, only to have those dreams dashed time and again with miscarriages. After one of those painful losses, and with two healthy children under their roof, Tammy’s husband asked her to consider no more children because he simply couldn’t watch her lose another pregnancy. They stopped trying but did expand their family in another way, with the arrival of four foreign exchange students who came in their teen years and somehow never left. Tammy got her six kids after all.
Professionally, Tammy excelled in advocacy work, building a career in banking, but when her all too close call with Rennick coincided with her mother’s retirement from nursing, Tammy knew it was time to make a change. She began helping her mother further create EdCor, a training center that certifies health professions and community members in the kind of interventions that make the difference between life and death. Through her work teaching CPR and overseeing the training of so many others, Tammy is doing what she can to ensure no one is left to be a helpless witness to a preventable tragedy. “I just never want another person – man, woman, caregiver, bystander – to not feel confident that they can do what they need to do to save a life,” she says. “We all need to be advocates in each other’s lives.”
Today, with all of her children grown, Tammy spends her days shuttling around the country from one training site to the next, doing what she can to create as many advocates as she can, because you never know when those skills will be called on to save a life.
It’s never too late to be the advocate.