http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/5800170.html Injured Texas Marine dies after enduring 100 surgeries
By SHARON COHEN
The young Marine came back from the war, with his toughest fight ahead
of him.
Sgt. Merlin German waged that battle in the quiet of a Texas hospital,
far from the dusty road in Iraq where a bomb exploded, leaving him with
burns over 97 percent of his body.
No one expected him to survive.
But for more than three years, he would not surrender. He endured more
than 100 surgeries and procedures. He learned to live with pain, to
stare at a stranger's face in the mirror. He learned to smile again, to
joke, to make others laugh.
He became known as the "Miracle Man."
But just when it seemed he would defy impossible odds, German lost his
last battle this spring — an unexpected final chapter in a story many
imagined would have a happy ending.
"I think all of us had believed in some way, shape or form that he was
invincible," says Lt. Col. Evan Renz, who was German's surgeon and his
friend. "He had beaten so many other operations. ... It just reminded
us, he, too, was human."
It was near Ramadi, Iraq, on Feb. 21, 2005, that the roadside bomb
detonated near German's Humvee, hurling him out of the turret and
engulfing him in flames.
When Renz and other doctors at the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical
Center in San Antonio first got word from Baghdad, they told his family
he really didn't have a chance. The goal: Get him back to America so
his loved ones could say goodbye.
But when German arrived four days later, doctors, amazed by how well he
was doing, switched gears. "We were going to do everything known to
science," Renz says. "He was showing us he can survive."
Doctors removed his burn wounds and covered him with artificial and
cadaver skin. They also harvested small pieces of German's healthy
skin, shipping them off to a lab where they were grown and sent back.
Doctors took skin from the few places he wasn't burned: the soles of
his feet, the top of his head and small spots on his abdomen and left
shoulder.
Once those areas healed, doctors repeated the task. Again and again.
"Sometimes I do think I can't do it," German said last year in an
Associated Press interview. "Then I think: Why not? I can do whatever I
want."
Renz witnessed his patient's good and bad days.
"Early on, he thought, 'This is ridiculous. Why am I doing this? Why am
I working so hard?' " Renz recalls. "But every month or so, he'd say,
'I've licked it.' ... He was amazingly positive overall. ... He never
complained. He'd just dig in and do it."
Slowly, his determination paid off. He made enormous progress.
From a ventilator to breathing on his own.
From communicating with his eyes or a nod to talking.
From being confined to a hospital isolation bed with his arms and legs
suspended — so his skin grafts would take — to moving into his own
house and sleeping in his own bed.
Sometimes his repeated surgeries laid him up for days, and he'd lose
ground in his rehabilitation. But he'd always rebound.
Even when he was hurting, he'd return to therapy — as long as he had
his morning Red Bull energy drink.
"I can't remember a time where he said, 'I can't do it. I'm not going
to try,' " says Sgt. Shane Elder, a rehabilitation therapy assistant.
That despite the constant reminders that he'd never be the same. The
physical fitness buff who could run miles and do dozens of push-ups
struggled, at first, just to sit up on the edge of his bed. The
one-time saxophone player had lost his fingers. The Marine with the
lady-killer smile now had a raw, ripple-scarred face.
Lt. Col. Grant Olbrich recalls a day in 2006 when he stopped by
German's room and noticed he was crying softly. Olbrich, who heads a
Marine patient affairs team at Brooke, says he sat with him awhile and
asked: "What are you scared of?' He said, 'I'm afraid there will never
be a woman who loves me.' "
Olbrich says that was the lowest he ever saw German, but even then "he
didn't give up. ... He was unstoppable."
His mother, Lourdes, remembers her son another way: "He was never
really scared of anything."
That toughness, says his brother, Ariel, showed up even when they were
kids growing up in New York.
Playing football, German would announce: "Give me the ball. Nobody can
knock me down."
In nearly 17 months in the hospital, German's "family" grew.
From the start, his parents, Lourdes and Hemery, were with him. They
relocated to Texas. His mother helped feed and dress her son; they
prayed together three, four times a day.
"She said she would never leave his side," Ariel says. "She was his
eyes, his ears, his feet, his everything."
But many at the hospital also came to embrace German.
Norma Guerra, a public affairs spokeswoman who has a son in Iraq,
became known as German's "Texas mom."
She read him action-packed stories at his bedside and arranged to have
a DVD player in his room so he could watch his favorite gangster
movies.
She sewed him pillows embroidered with the Marine insignia. She helped
him collect New York Yankees memorabilia and made sure he met every
celebrity who stopped by — magician David Blaine became a friend, and
President Bush visited.
"He was a huge part of me," says Guerra, who had German and his parents
over for Thanksgiving. "I remember him standing there talking to my
older sister like he knew her forever."
German liked to gently tease everyone about fashion — his sense of
style, and their lack of it.
Guerra says he once joked: "I've been given a second chance. I think I
was left here to teach all you people how to dress."
Even at Brooke, he color-coordinated his caps and sneakers.
German also was something of an entrepreneur. Back in high school, he
attended his senior prom, not with a date but with a giant bag of
disposable cameras to make some quick cash from those who didn't have
the foresight to bring their own.
At Brooke, he designed a T-shirt that he sometimes sold, sometimes gave
away. On the front it read: "Got 3 percent chance of survival, what ya
gonna do?" The back read, "a) Fight Through, b) Stay Strong, c)
Overcome Because I Am a Warrior, d) All Of The Above." D is circled.
Every time he cleared a hurdle, the staff at Brooke cheered him on.
When he first began walking, Guerra says, word spread in the hospital
corridors. "People would say, 'Did you know Merlin took his first step?
Did you know he took 10 steps?' " she recalls.
German, in turn, was asked by hospital staff to motivate other burn
patients when they were down or just not interested in therapy.
"I'd say, 'Hey, can you talk to this patient?' ... Merlin would come in
... and it was: Problem solved," says Elder, the therapist. "The thing
about him was there wasn't anything in the burn world that he hadn't
been through. Nobody could say to him, 'You don't understand.' "
German understood, too, that burn patients deal with issues outside the
hospital because of the way they look.
"When he saw a group of children in public, he was more concerned about
what they might think," says Renz, his surgeon. "He would work to make
them comfortable with him."
And kids adored him, including Elder's two young sons. German had a
habit of buying them toys with the loudest, most obnoxious sounds — and
presenting them with a mischievous smile.
He especially loved his nieces and nephews; the feelings were mutual.
One niece remembered him on a Web site as being "real cool and funny"
and advising her to "forget about having little boyfriends and buying
hot phones" and to concentrate on her education instead.
But he was closest to his mother. When the hospital's Holiday Ball
approached in 2006, German told Guerra he wanted to surprise his mother
by taking her for a twirl on the dance floor.
Guerra thought he was kidding. She knew it could be agony for him just
to take a short walk or raise a scarred arm.
But she agreed to help, and they rehearsed for months, without his
mother knowing. He chose a love song to be played for the dance: Have I
Told You Lately? by Rod Stewart.
That night he donned his Marine dress blues and shiny black shoes —
even though it hurt to wear them. When the time came, he took his
mother in his arms and they glided across the dance floor.
Everyone stood and applauded. And everyone cried.
Clearly, it seemed, the courageous Marine was winning his long, hard
battle.
Merlin German died after routine surgery to add skin to his lower lip.
He was already planning his next operations — on his wrists and elbows.
But Renz also says with all the stress German's body had been subjected
to in recent years, "it was probably an unfair expectation that you can
keep doing this over and over again and not have any problems."
The cause of his death has not yet been determined.
"I may no more understand why he left us when he did than why he
survived when he did," Renz says. "I don't think I was meant to know."
As people learned of his death last month, they flocked to his hospital
room to pay their last respects: Doctors, nurses, therapists and
others, many arriving from home, kept coming as Friday night faded into
Saturday morning.
German was just 22.
He had so many dreams that will go unrealized: Becoming an FBI agent
(he liked the way they dressed). Going to college. Starting a business.
Even writing comedy.
But he did accomplish a major goal: He set up a foundation for burned
children called "Merlin's Miracles" to raise money so these kids could
enjoy life, whether it was getting an air conditioner for their home or
taking a trip to Disney World, a place he loved.
On a sunny April afternoon, German was buried among the giant oaks and
Spanish moss of Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell.
Memorial Day is a time to remember the fallen with parades, tributes
and stories.
Sgt. Joe Gonzales, a Marine liaison at Brooke, has a favorite story
about German.
It was the day he and German's mother were walking in the hospital
hallway. German was ahead, wearing an iPod, seemingly oblivious to
everyone else.
Suddenly, he did a sidestep.
For a second, Gonzales worried German was about to fall. But no.
"He just started dancing out of nowhere. His mom looked at me. She
shook her head. There he was with a big old smile. Regardless of his
situation, he was still trying to enjoy life."
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