The Trauma Sponge

If it's okay for Costco to put out their Christmas trees already, it's okay for us to announce that we are taking our Happy-ish holidays show out on the road. Our new tour includes 10 stops between Thanksgiving and Christmas because the holidays for some of us are pretty much happy-ish. We have so much fun at these live shows. Come on out, you can come alone, you will meet a friend, you can get your tickets at the link in our show description or at Happy-ish holidays dot com. How are you? Most people answer that question with fine or good, but obviously it's not always fine and it's usually not even that good. This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain. To just be honest about how they really feel, about the hard parts of life, and guess what? It's complicated. I think it's a civil service job and the same way we have incomprehensible bike lanes, the cities overall, you know, plans and stuff are just going to break your heart. I'm Nora McNerney and this is terrible, thanks for asking. That's going to be a far call for one or both of the other ranks. And that is Jeremy Norton, trying to sit down for an interview with our senior producer Marcel Malikibu. I've been with Minneapolis for 23 years. I'm the rank of Captain, which is a supervisor, first line supervisor. Survey a group of little kids and at least one of them will tell you that they want to be a firefighter when they grow up. Pay attention at Halloween, you're going to see plenty of little kids wearing red plastic helmets and reflective jackets. Because who wouldn't want to grow up to be a hero? I'd never cross my mind, you know, I say that in DC where I grew up, the safe way where we would shop for food was right at the edge of Georgetown. And so I would see firefighters in there every time we shopped. But really I would see the Georgetown Hoyas basketball, I would see Patrick Ewing shopping. And that had a much bigger effect on me than seeing the DC FD guys and gals. And the reason why you see the firefighters is because they're on a 24 hour shift and they shop together so they have the food for their shift. But I never cross my mind. And I also was never going to be a Georgetown Hoyas basketball player either. So I wanted this for a couple years because when I moved up here in 94, a woman I'd known a little bit in high school had just joined the fire department. And I was like, wow, that's weird. I was working at a restaurant, I had no health insurance. She had a paycheck, she had an interesting job and I was like, that sounds cool. And I'd been an English teacher before that. And I wanted to learn to take up 80 hours a week and so that's how I kind of got in there. But meeting Jen and learning about what she did really resonated because the kind of the challenge of a physical challenge, the challenge of helping people challenge of engaging in the world, even though I didn't understand any of what firefighting and being EMT entailed. And listening to Jen and most of her cohort of other kind of second wave women hired by the department in the early 90s really seemed inspiring and motivating to me. When I get to the fire station, I figure I'm going to be meeting Jeremy for the first time. I call him, he comes out. But he ends up reminding me that we had met once before at a live show. Jeremy tells me that I was kind of pissed off looking when I was there and I didn't really remember that part. My impression of Jeremy on this second first impression, I guess, is that he kind of looks like a vegan rockabilly volunteer barista at a used bookstore. And what impresses me about him in this second first interaction is that he can communicate and carry on a conversation during things like this. And the lights and the speakers will stay on for up to four or five minutes after each one. And so if it were for just the chief, the crews here in the middle of the night, we'll be, you know, awakened because we're trained to wake up and respond like you learn how to be a light sleeper. And then you'll just sit there waiting for the lights to go off. And we can't, like, that's one of the kind of the modern, you know, for the sake of content that interruption came right on time. But let's get back to the interview. It is kind of a lottery, you, for Minneapolis, you know, for most full time city departments, it's a civil service test. His first try at the test happens in 1996, and the test is divided into parts. One of the parts that kind of creeps me out a little bit and I'm not quite sure why is the psychological profile. It's like, are you, you know, do you like fire, will you steal, do you, would you rather kiss your mom or, you know, throw rocks at a dog? So Jeremy passes that part just fine, but he also has to do a written test in a physical aptitude test. Dragon the dummy is the last part of the physical test it used to be. And that was prohibitive for a lot of people, like lifting a 185 pound dummy, you know, and getting it used to be you have to put the dummy in the window to, for, to simulate a rescue. Now, even though we do everything in pairs, and so there are very few times that I'm alone in a building, it was still this idea that can you do these fire ground tasks. And then I had bronchitis today, I took the test, I was hauling ass through the different stations of the test, I got to the dummy, I'm dragging it and I'm wheezing like a freight train, I'm just wheezing as I've got bronchitis, and I get to the window and the dummy slips out of my hands. And I had never once problem solved. So all the women that I've been watching train and, and I'd never had to problem solve myself because it had never crossed my mind that I wouldn't be able just to lift the dummy. But so I get to the window and I'm, I'm hypoxic and I'm adrenalized and I'm panicked. And I basically just lost my mind. I could not figure out how to like, you know, and because the dummy was leaning against the wall, it's, there's friction and it's heavy and it's unwieldy. And I was like, I spent until I basically died at the window and the time were elapsed, trying to lift the damn thing up and all I had to do was collect myself, pull it back six inches, lift it and chuck it through the window. But I'd never practiced that. And that, and so that cost me getting hired or, you know, moving forward in the hiring process in 96. When I was looking at the job, a lot of white men would say, well, you're a white guy, you're never going to get hired, even though most of almost every class is predominantly white men. My, my low placement on the, on the hiring list was not because I'm a white male being discriminated against. But because my nerdy ass overthought the basic literary, the literacy test that the city gave us, I was in the, I was in the convention center with about a thousand people taking this test and I could not believe that the question was that poorly written. And I, and I had almost a psychotic breakdown trying to part, like trying to decipher what they meant. And this is like an eighth grade reading level they are testing for. But I was going, there's no, like this doesn't make sense. And so I got so spun out that I answered wrong. And so, and, and the, the points are that tight or at that point, they were that tight that one wrong answer on the reading comprehension probably dropped me 30 spots. And it's a matter of, I mean, essentially a matter of luck. Like I could reapply for my position in Minneapolis now with 23 years on with the experiences I have with my promotions. And really the base, the base things that the city is looking for is, do I qualify as protected class member and am I a military veteran? Like other previous stuff really doesn't get that much weight. And the city, because it's expensive to run a test process, they will hold a list for, you know, two to six years, two to seven years. I became unglued during that. And that cost me, well, arguably that cost me, I mean, I was in the fourth class of four groups of 30. And everything is really tightly done by seniority. And so, you know, it was, it was a good humbling lesson in terms of, I outfought myself and I should have known that the city wasn't asking me for like upper level language tricks. They were just basically asking, can I read and understand a badly written English sentence? That small mistake Jeremy makes on the test bothers him for a long time. And being put that low on the hiring list means he's going to have to wait a long time for that lottery ticket to be pulled. Hi, hi, hi, what are you, what are you doing? I'm just making those last updates to the happiest holidays at Squarespace website before the tickets go live. Perfect. But I was calling to ask you how easy Squarespace was, and you love using Squarespace. I love using Squarespace, sometimes I feel like we wrestle over who gets to update the Squarespace. I know, but it's to update the website because it's so satisfying. Okay, look, you heard it there first, you heard it there second, you heard it there a million times. We truly love Squarespace, we've been using it forever. Squarespace has truly everything you need to build a beautiful website. You can set up e-commerce there, analytics, set up your email campaigns, they've got a ton of third party tools, go to squarespace.com slash TTIFA, sign up for your free trial when you are ready to launch, use our offer code TTIFA, that'll get you 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. So squarespace.com slash TTIFA, use offer code TTIFA and send us your amazing website when it's done. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you already know that I am obsessed with sleep and that I've always struggled with my sleep becoming a good sleeper has been a huge priority. I've personally been using the Hatch restore to for longer than you've been hearing the ads on this podcast. It is a sound machine, a night light and an alarm for grownups, okay, and it's helped me build a really solid sleep routine. I play a mix of white and pink noise to fall asleep. It plays all night and then it gently wakes me up. I like the light to be a little more on the pinky side. You can select the light you want to wake up to. The sound you want to wake up to and I have been waking up so rested that I've actually been waking up with the light before the sound even as time to go off. I love this thing. I am sleeping so amazing and if you are a person who struggles to put yourself to sleep, I really, really think that you would love the Hatch restore to. We obviously have a deal for you. Right now you can get $20 off. Your purchase of a Hatch restore to and free shipping at Hatch.co slash TTFA. Sleep deeply and wake gently with the restore to go to Hatch.co slash TTFA to get $20 off and free shipping that's Hatch.co slash TTFA will also have a link in our show description and on our website. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. We at Feelings and Co are big fans of therapy. I don't want to speak for everybody at this show but I go to therapy once a week and that's because therapy is awesome. Being a person is really, really hard. Every week on the show we tell you stories about people who are living through or have lived through really hard things and it's very hard to go through this world alone. It's even harder when being in your head is not a healthy place to be. Therapy has given me time and space and tools to live a healthier life. If you are thinking about trying therapy, BetterHelp could be a good fit for you. BetterHelp is entirely online so it's convenient, it's flexible, it can fit into your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire, you get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists whenever you need to at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash TTFA today to get 10% off your first month. It's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash TTFA. It's the year 2000 when Jeremy is finally hired on as a bonafide firefighter. My first six months I was just trying to figure out how to get my gear on, get on the rig quickly. It's this immersion in emergency response. While I was learning, there was so much especially back then that was left over from the post Vietnam era 70s and 80s, still very paramilitary, very macho, it was still a pretty brutal social environment and so behaviors and cultural wars were inculcated through just bullying and being hardasses because the idea is that that's how you're, if they are hard to get me in the station as a rookie, that's how they can know that I'll be able to handle myself out of fire, which none of which is true, it's not science, it's just mostly leads to more people faking it nervously because they don't want to look bad. So my first several years, I was kind of in the wilderness trying to make sense of what seemed to me not to make sense here versus what also felt as if there were other ways through. I would ask around here of it, at first I was too junior, no one took me seriously and then I was a young captain, I didn't know anything and then it was only really I think when I did well on the chief's test that suddenly people are like, oh, he must know something, I'm like, I'm still the same ordinary motherfucker, I've always been, you all just mistakenly didn't pay attention to me when you could have and now you have to because I outrank you. So this is like a kitchen, you guys have a whole cast iron. Being at a fire station is kind of weird. I didn't realize there was a really nice kitchen, there's a gym, there's a flat screen TV and while I'm there I count about three firefighters that are walking around doing various things, getting coffee, making food. There's a lot quieter than I thought it would be but at the same time there's a lot more going on than I thought. So this is normal, like if you were on, you're not on, you're not working right now, right for the record. Currently I'm off-hurt but ordinarily I would have come in yesterday morning around seven, put my equipment on the rig, relieve the other captain and then it's basically my crew and my shift or my, everything that happens is under us. So the cleaning, the cooking, the eating, napping, training, station duties, paperwork, everything that happens during our shift as a captain, I'm responsible for. Beginning of 1900s you basically go to work for a month and have like one day to go home, check the chickens and the kids, breed more chickens and kids and then go back to work. And that is kind of, for whatever reason we still largely do 24-hour shifts, almost across the country we should get away from this, you know that we've, that for whatever reason there's not a day shift in a night shift, there's just, it's a 24-hour shift, some places like we have one of our crews does a 48-hour shift and then the other two do 24-hour shifts. So we split our week in six days, which means my in-laws have never been able to figure out what I'm working and what I'm not. So it's not that I work every Monday and Wednesday. One week if I work Monday and Wednesday, the next week I'd work Sunday, Tuesday, the following week, Saturday, Monday. So it's constantly moving backwards. So you guys can work out in the fire station, get paid to eat, sleep, work out, watch TV, and save people. And then in the, yeah, and that's kind of the, you know, it used to be kind of a quasi-military, paramilitary and it was kind of regimented and a lot of that was a really kind of intense work ethic and kind of really intense social policing. But we're also now realizing that, you know, being kind of stoic and hard-bitten doesn't really get us anywhere. That bottling up or feelings doesn't get us anywhere. So the raft of social, you know, dysfunctions, alcoholism, drug addiction, being abusive, divorced, like all that stuff that used to be part of being this job and with police, those aren't, they don't necessarily need to happen and they aren't productive. And so looking at, trying to look at the ways that we can shift our culture within the fact that the certain type of people are often drawn to this job. So working out during the day we've shown is better than being sedentary because we're not fighting a dozen fires a day. So this job where they say, you're a firefighter, here's the cool gear, here's the iconic rig, here's the big station. If you don't do the right thing, you're going to die. Don't fuck up. But meanwhile, while you're waiting to get the skill, the angels, St. Florian to come in and bestow firefighter knowledge on you, you're nervously waiting and then you're going on medical call after medical call after car wreck after, you know, maybe like the alarms we saw earlier that are just, you know, someone burnt food or someone had too much steam from their shower or it's humid. And so you're not really getting hands-on training in a job that requires hands-on training, right? And so I think that disconnect sets up a lot of people in the emergency response professions to have a constant like dissonance, you know, I've pulled a couple of people out of fires, but I've saved a whole lot more lives doing the EMT portion of the job. And that's a part that if I were inclined, I would think that's just the distraction. I'm a fireman. I have to go put out fires. But we don't do it. You know, that cozy feeling you get when you walk into a bookstore, well, bookshop.org is committed to helping independent bookstores survive and thrive and keep that feeling alive. Bookshop.org believes local bookstores are essential community hubs that foster culture, curiosity, and a love of reading. Every purchase you make on bookshop.org directly supports independent bookstores. So they'll be around for all of us to enjoy in the future. Every book we talk about on Terrible Reading Club, you can get on bookshop.org. You can also get millions of other books today, including the books that I wrote. And we've got a deal for you. You can save 10% on your next order by going to bookshop.org slash ttfa or bookshop.org slash shop slash the Terrible Reading Club. We also just have these linked in our show descriptions, guys, and use the code Terrible at checkout so they know we sent you. This episode is presented by Shoppefy. Did you know that 10,000 German companies already use Shoppefy? The Commerce Platform is a complete solution. With which you can build your own company, start, work, and build up. With Shoppefy you can simply write your own online shop. Also without knowledge in programming or design. Test Shoppefy is kostenlose and bring your business ideas to the world. Go to Shoppefy.de, Shrek Strich Podcast 23. The amount of griping is legendary. Like the degree and extent of people's petty pissing matches and griping and complaining is stunning. But I think that's just a, you know, it's a human factor. But in a job where you've got 24 hours to formulate your list of grievances. And you know, in the fact that we are getting paid and we have health insurance and people treat us well and all that, a lot of people, like they buy their own hype and that leads either to risky behaviors on fire scenes, crappy treatment of people in public because they forget that that is the essence of our job. You know, or at the station, it leads to people treating other people, you know, like shit because that's what happened to them, like just like the pecking order and the hierarchy and all that. So it's really easy to miss the fact that, like, that we benefit from the public good will because we've earned it and it's not permanent, right? So that if we, like, if we treat people poorly, if we get caught on film doing something, we are then accountable for what all firefighters do, kind of. But yeah, I mean, we generally like to be in charge of ourselves. It's a bunch of grown up man boys and, you know, and man girls, baby girls, you know, or whatever it's youth. Oh, yeah, women girls, like again, another place where language fails us. It's a hierarchy that, that boy fire ladies is my, is the politically useful term. But we're just grown up kids, like, you know, that how much the job is ridiculous fun. And it's not when we're not in spite of all the hard stuff. It's kind of because of all the hard stuff. And so it's a lot of like kind of Tom Sawyer's and Nancy Drew, like people who like to solve stuff and are clever, but then also like to generally, like, we're not cops. Like we're, it makes it easier to deal with the people we deal with because if I don't have a really intense sense of what's right or wrong, when I'm dealing with somebody who is just stealing a car and drove into a wall, I don't, I don't moralize them while I'm helping them out, right? Like there's, and, and that's what I was saying before it's like, it's just, like, it's an insucient love of fuckery. Like humans make horrible decisions. You see the end result of the American kind of white supremacist machine. You see the end result of this generations of sociological imbalance. And you see it in the form of this person who made these decisions to bring us all to this one point. And if you're going to be reductive or simplistic, it's because that person is bad or flawed. And then you realize, well, we're all flawed. And so it's looking at how, like, being present in the moment, treating them with respect, non-judgmentally being neutral, even in your head, you're like, you just, you know, you just drunk drove and you hurt your kids, fuck you, but that, that lecture doesn't need to happen, right? But then you come back and I really can't reinforce like both the best and the worst in people, but unfortunately, even if we're not as a police charge with prosecuting or arresting people, prosecuting, you know, arresting people or interrupting, you know, the consequences for bad decisions. We still see that. And it's hard when you see people smoking around their kids and the kids have breathing issues. It's hard not, you know, you see people drunk driving and the consequences of that. You see the violence, you know, you see all that stuff and it's hard not to get fed up with people's very self-assure oblivious human decisions. So it's an existential crisis, like, think about, like, what we think of police doing and you look at the statistics and they are, they remain, and we are also reactionary. They, you know, they're not, like, they're the notion of what you're doing in terms of law and order in terms of what it's so, it's largely social work without actually training. Like, the people we go to see on the streets who are struggling, who are having mental crisis, emotional crisis, health crises, like, really often all it, like all we can offer is kind of human connection, human compassion, being present with somebody and help them get to somewhere else. But most of us know that the ED, the emergency department, the ER, isn't going to fix someone's chronic mental health issue or crisis. And we don't have this, nothing's in place in the larger system. We ourselves as police officers, as paramedics, as firefighters, can't change that. We just have to keep showing up and cleaning up and hoping that some financial miracle happens so that the hospitals and the insurance companies take a better approach to the public's health. People are bringing a wide range of things to shape who they are and how they see the world. All we know is that an immigrant family's smoke detector was beeping and they called 911 because that's what they were told to do. Right? It's two in the morning, they were worried that their house is on fire. It's not on fire. And so we're like, you know, you woke us up and this is also the fifth one we've been in the neighborhood in the course of a shift so that where is honest and so that ability to kind of not judge people, not take it personally and be neutral. And so that leads to a degree of like insuscient, not giving a fuckness because you, like they went to a guy who was smoking meth yesterday and one of the byproducts of smoking meth is a raspy throat and a high, high, high pulse. So then he thought his heart was exploding. We see lots, lots of people who've been smoking meth or crack who think their hearts are exploding like because they don't have a warning label on the package. So we're looking at those like, dude, you're highest, like they haven't got the label on it yet. So you're like, yeah, you smoked, this is, this is direct. So for us, I think, and whether that's, you know, we go in a gas leak, I smell a fire, a smoke in a house, our job is to parse off all the extraneous factors and get to the thing of what is actually happening. So we walk in, you know, someone says, well, peanut butter, I did this and that, like because we're not that skilled, like firefighters are not that highly trained, we're not like paramedics, we're not like doctors or nurses, anything like that. We get really good if we're doing the job right of reading people and kind of having a really sharp situational awareness, a clarity of what is actually mattering here. And paramedics don't have our freedom to interpret because they have a higher liability standard, they're trained to a higher level and they basically are pressured to transport everybody. So and I look at it now at this point is saying like knowing that they are trapped in a health care, like they're trapped in a tough pattern where they have to, they feel they have to transport everybody so they don't get sued, they transport people who don't need or don't really want to be transported because the result is if someone comes back later and says you neglected me, that was abandonment, they're going to get sued in there and the hospital isn't going to back them. Right. Like it's the good Samaritan thing. I'm like we're just like I'm just a firefighter, I have no ability to change how the system works, but that is the thing that drives like the basically fear of liability and the for-profit hospitals drive so much of the 911 system. So then we keep getting called and the paramedics get called and the police get called to things that are largely social systems failures. Yeah, yeah, my, my grandmother, she, she died recently, but when we try to get her into like long-term care, basically she was starting to fall, every day she was 90. And my dad couldn't take care of her anymore because wife is a 35-year nurse, retired nurse, whatever air force. So what, what we did was my dad kept taking her into the doctor, kept taking her, see the neurologist, they can't get a bed for her, they can't get her in. So one day he's like, you know what we're going to do? Next time she falls, we're going to call the ambulance because that way we know she's going straight to the emergency room, blah, blah. And so it happened and we did get her admitted and we did get things done. And she is an immigrant, can't speak English and whatever. So to your point, it's like, yeah, there, there are a lot of people kind of misused the system or they learn that they can't use the system the way she should be. So they're just like, you know what, I'm going to do this. I don't know about calling for my daughter scraping her knee, she's going to have to figure that shit out. Right. But a lot of new parents, young parents, like that's the thing, it's been like this. I don't fault people for the concern. Right. But they don't understand that they're calling because 911 is the only option to call. And 911 has no option but to send us because everyone's worried about getting sued. Thanks for being on that. I'll work on it. So that is that five people. So that's a fire call being dispatched throughout our conversation. The quieter ones have been radio calls around the city. But when it's us specifically, the lights click on and all the speakers in every room pop on. Okay. So what do you do right now? Not you personally. What these cats are going to do? Well, we can come and watch them. They're going to go get dressed. Yes. I'm just not going to get in you guys way, but this is. I live for this shit. This is exactly what I wanted to oh my god. Yeah. This is cool. Holy shit. I just don't want to get in someone's way and somebody dies or she'll say, but I forget. People love it. My dad and his girlfriend were just visiting. She's never been to a firehouse. You put her on the rig. 76 years old. Happy as a clam. Wow. Okay. Hostload that you guys got going professionals. So right now we're standing back in a safe distance right away from engine 17, right? Yep. It's the iconic official fire truck of this day. And then the chief's about to call it say it's a commercial fire alarm, which means it could be anything from burnt food, steam from a shower, no smoke is reported. And so a majority of our fire calls are just to investigate an alarm being tripped. Yeah, you drive past a fine. I said before the most firehouses that have been built in the past 30 years are generally single station. Like single story because people kept breaking their legs in the middle of the night sliding the poles. But there's still huge buildings and you walk past the outside of one and assume, you know, there's 40 strapping men and women and they're ready to rip the shit out of a fire. And really, they're often three of us. Okay. In our case, we have three on our side and now with the rescue rig temporarily quartered here. We have another four people on that rig. And it's, you know, in our living area, it gets a little confined quarters. But you see, you've got all the lockers for a gear and for the crews who are off that day's gear. They have to be tall because of the size of the rigs, everything out here, everything is loud. I mean, the job is nothing but like hard angles and noise. And then after the riots, when I was coming up with stuff to do during COVID, since there are so many, you know, so many of the traditional fire, you know, like fire mascots are a bull, the devil, a stallion, a skeleton, you know, a rift shit macho stuff. I was like, what's going to be the best one? So we went with a, the sparkly, sparkling is unicorn you could find. And it is an awesome litmus test because kids love it. Most people think it's a hoot and then among my coworkers, most of them just kind of chuckle. But the, you know, but the dudes who are threatened by having a unicorn on their shirt because they think that means their truck might get taken away and they aren't, they aren't macho enough. They've already failed the test. So I sold a bunch of shirts that I made, kind of raised money for, for a couple different local, local groups as, you know, it's just a donation. Okay. So there are a lot of them going out and we, that is our official logo. So it's on our uniform shirts. It is pretty dope. And it does. And I was saying before, like, yeah, so one of my coworkers got really, really, really, really, really into unicorns. Like, so all the unicorns around the station, you could see if you look, they're a shit ton of them. He's got hidden. He was worried that the sparkly one wasn't going to pass that he wouldn't be approved. So he, because it was going to be too, a little too, sparkly. So he basically took like Denver Broncos, Angry Horse mascot, stuck a rainbow on its main and stuck a cone on its head. So that's our, like, that's our alternate version. Yeah. So when they get in the truck, the other thing I noticed is like, you're not in full on right, I don't know, the turn, the turn, the turn, the turn out gear. Yeah. And we can come out of it. It's how to shit out here. Yeah. They were pretty sure that the address was right close to the, the other, because there are three rigs, cent plus the chief, two engine companies in a truck, the end, the closer engine was going to get there first. And so on. And so they were putting the rest of their gear on as they got on the rig. Okay. A good example of kind of the habitual casualness that can bite you in the ass is we get so used to things being false alarms. We get used to things not being emergencies because there's such a paradoxical adrenaline search when the lights pop on, you're sound asleep middle of the night, pop on, you hear the, the five beeps of a fire call, you're thinking, oh my god, it's a fire. Let's get there rushing. And then it's nothing. And so you get these adrenaline surges and let downs. And so after a while, you hear an address and say, we've had, you know, we've had 30 false alarms at that high rise. It's going to be the 31st. And, and the ideas were supposed to be able to respond quickly and adapt quickly. But I've been with captains when I was in the back seat, who were always casual. And then we rolled up on something that was way more than, it was way more than, and they were flat foot and they were behind. You know, and it's like seconds count and also having a presence of mind. You know, as I said, like you have to slough off all the extraneous and focus. And so middle of the night, you pull up on something, you didn't expect it to be much. You have to be like, okay, there's, there are people trapped inside that house. The whole front of the house is on fire. The neighbors are screaming. The neighbor's house to the south is at risk. I've got to wake the fuck up and figure out a plan. And then, and then radio it to the world coherently, right? And so, and that's where all the, the expectation of the public and the kind of mythos of firefighters is that, you know, we're unflapable. We've seen it all. We've done it all. But the reality of it is the number of fires has shrunk pretty much every year since the 70s, thanks to a lot of successful arson's in the 80s and, and smoke detectors, right? We've got much better fire safety. And so now, you know, burn your food cooking, the smoke detector will let you know you'll put it out. It used to be the stove would catch fire than the kitchen would catch fire. So we would have a lot more fires. And so, it's an existential crisis for the fire service that were firefighters, but we don't fight that many fires. And then in the, in the meantime, the calls for service, the emergency response aspect of the job has gone up, you know, so that our, our calls for service, what we do, any of the 911 calls, it gets dumped on us because dispatch really only has three people on, or four people on speed dial, police, paramedics, fire department, and then city workers. So we get called for lots of miscellaneous stuff. And, and so we're supposed to, you know, kind of handle everything with a plum, not really get rattled, not get bothered. And then also be kind of like boy and girl scouts able to problem solve in, in the moment. Mostly downstairs. Yeah, let's, so let's do it while these fire station batteries are way, way better than the quote, unquote, heavy-duty, super-duty, off-brand corner store batteries, so. I've, I had a couple injuries in the past couple of years. One was, one was pulling, I, actually Bob, who you didn't meet, Bob and I, I was pulling somebody out of a fire, Bob tried to help me, he fell through the floor, cracked his leg, and then the, as Bob fell, I fell and kind of wrenched my shoulder, and then about the next shift I worked, it was lifting somebody up off the floor, a person who passed out on the sidewalk, as I was lifting him, my shoulders went flop and popped out, you know, so, but then the one I, like I'm off right now with a knee injury from carrying an overdose person on the snow, and he collapsed, and, you know, on the ice, and he took me out, and then I heard it, you know, three months later, carrying bags through a, basically a lot of, a homeless encampment, so there's a lot of to try to solve the ground, and I misstep. So so much of our work is literally lifting people, we're body conveyors, we move people through their houses, you're like when your grandmother wasn't doing well, if you'd called 911, up there, engine 14, engine 20, or ladder 10, would have shown up, and figured out how to get her, no matter whether she's bigger, small, from the upstairs, down the stairs, around the corners, through the house, out to the ambulance, like, that's what we are, like that level of problem solving, you know, at this point with 23 years on, and, you know, since 2007, as a, as a captain, as a supervisor, my job is to figure that stuff out, and with a lot of the paramedics, a lot of them are new because they've had so much turnover, so they've got more training than I do, but they don't have practical experience, and so I can see what are going to be the, the main problems of a call that, that don't require a defibrillator, don't require them injecting drugs, like it's literally just physics, human behavior and physics, and that's one of the benefits that a lot of us get really good at, is saying, okay, holistically, what is a situation need? And so, but, but going back to this stuff, it's like stretching out, eating better, it used to be you would have, like soggy, soggy veggies from a can, some sort of like charred white meat, and iceberg lettuce were the meals. I was a vegetarian for my first several years, I almost killed five people with the name tofu, before they even tried it, and then they, you know, and then I just don't, you know, put some like barbecue sauce on it, they just thought it was mushy meat, but you know, so like there, there have been a lot of good cultural things, it doesn't change the fact that what we're doing doesn't change, and so we have to figure out ways to handle the realities of the job, and there aren't any real life hacks for dealing with other people suffering. Right, but you got to lift the weight. You got to lift the weight, you've got to figure out how to do stuff, but you also got to figure out how to kind of stay, stay sane and maintain compassion. So they're back? Oh, I get there back. It was not a big blaze. Okay. Wow. And, you know, as you can see, like this is kind of our home for 24, 48 hours. What are the hardest aspects of this job? I mean, I think on one hand, you have a work force of people who are generally like independent, oppositional defiant risk takers. So we all think we know better, right? So I'm putting myself squarely in a viable or real tradition. And I think we always run, you know, there's always kind of attention between us and the stations versus the administration versus the city. And so there's also attention of like once you promote up, don't lose, you don't forget where you came from. But a lot of it's because what we deal with here is often just interpersonal stuff or patty stuff. And then also when you get when they, for the you move up, you also realize that making changes difficult because of civil service rules, because of HR rules, because of city state rules, because of union issues. And so there's a lot of impasse. I will say that one example would be all the talk now about people with emotional or mental crises on the streets, right? So very few us have social work degrees or any social sociology training. It's really what we see on the job and what we learn from it. So there are a lot of really good, you know, police officers, medics, firefighters who just go with the flow. We because we don't have to arrest or transport. We don't have to enforce the laws. We are freer as firefighters to have kind of a more holistic approach. And a lot of my coworkers are great. I mean, are just awesome dealing with people. We are kind of, we are the ones who are never non-plus. We're always plus, right? They're like, you're drunk, you're high, you're talking to a goldfish, fucking a right, we're fine. And there are a lot of police officers who are pretty good at handling that. But because there have been, how he has always been, solve this problem, deal with this. They don't have the same freedom we have to be fluid or unbothered by stuff. And then a lot of my coworkers are kind of more military or much more than us versus them. You know, longer for the death of George Floyd or the killing of George Floyd and then the aftermath. And then certainly in the, since 2020, there's been more acute awareness of interactions with the public. What I maintain has not really been understood is we emergency responders, badged people, we're still the default, right? So someone sees somebody licking the street, passed out, talking to a lamp post, bleeding, they call 911. 911 sends a dispatch sends us. If we, you know, they have an algorithm that they go through asking questions. If anything causes a red flag and their thing, they'll say, send police because we don't know what it is. So we've already started a crisis and the potential for an aggressive response or a problematic response. And it could be someone has is having a seizure. Someone is a diabetic. It's, you know, someone with Alzheimer's who's turned around, someone on, you know, withdrawing from drug, somebody on drug, somebody drunk, like not just having a mental, like there's so many things that could be causing someone to act divergently from a baseline quote normal. And someone calling in doesn't intend to have the person violently taken off the street. We show up and, you know, it's like where the BCR is great, but they've been kind of understaffed. And I wanted, like, I thought it would be great if we trained with the behavioral crisis response team. So that we have better skills to de-escalate because generally because we don't have guns, when we're don't have ambulance, like we don't have any, like we don't have the paramedics have sedatives, they have handcuffs, police have handcuffs and all the rest. And they have a squad car or an ambulance. We don't have any of that stuff. So we generally are pretty good at just being neutral with people. So it's a learned skill to kind of be chill. But when I was, like, what we were taught was kind of be chill and then then dog pile somebody or hog pile somebody. Just like try to talk them down if not everyone and then it's all on us. There's nothing in our SOPs, our procedures that say you're supposed to bum rush somebody. You know, it's like it was a safety thing. And so you look at there's so many cases across the country, but in this state where somebody who's experiencing any sort of altered mentation was was engaged from a position of, sir, we were called to help what's going on. And if the person is oppositional, is defiant, is incoherent, sir, I need you to sit down. I'm talking to you. And then it escalates. You know, sir, sit there. Sir, come back because once we've shown up, we're responsible. So they run into traffic. That's on us. Sir, I need you to sit down. Sir, we're trying to help. Sir, stop fighting. Sir, get out. And then it piles on. And so I frankly put the killing of George Floyd into that up that situation where the responding officers fail to recognize that he was in a crisis. And you can say yes through cultural biases, through blindness, through habituation, you had two very rookie cops who were afraid to fail the weathering gaze of their supervisor, the training officer. They missed him saying from the very beginning, I can't breathe. We've had so many people who were in altered mentation. So they find out later their drugs in a system fine, but that is not a death sentence. And we should expect as responders that people we encounter are going to be a wide range of people. So if I show up and someone's not making sense, rather than thinking, oh, I got to, I got to fucking sit this person down, like, oh, now I get to figure out what's going on with them. And, and here's the thing, we don't have many choices. And if we're not going to hogpile somebody and they're in crisis, like, even holding them down for their own safety can lead to respiratory arrest, can lead to esodosis, can lead to respiratory or cardiac failure. So even when we're not like not violent with somebody, stopping them from running away or flailing or running their heads through a brick wall, like doing what we're trying to do, if we don't have a sedative, we don't have a way to calm them down, even just flopping them onto an ambulance onto a cot and tying them down, that can lead to fatal medical condition. And then they die. And afterwards, it has been whitewashed, if you will, by the corners reports for years, there are so many dead people who died because responders misunderstood and did not have the training or the skills to recognize us. And I'm not putting this on any of the responders. I'm saying we, it is a structural issue. So this is when you get to what I'm feeling and my where the failure is, is that is a systemic and structural issue. And yeah, there's absolutely individual bias. I've got co-workers who are just are shitty with people. You know, I've had people, you know, my crew members come back and say, yeah, I worked with cell and so boy, that was horrible. You know, he was just an asshole to this person, like took personally the fact that the homeless person was having a hard day or that the person who was off his or her meds was acting weird. Like our gift as in this job is to try to be present and kind to people and not take their shit personally and recognize that we get to go home to our beds while they are stuck in their torment. And so that, but it's hard because being present means you open up your heart to them. And if what we see over and over again is the end results of of massive systemic problems, it's really, it can break your heart. And so you have to find that way of not burning out and not putting up too many walls and becoming cows. Like, you know, people often ask like, what's the worst thing you've seen or you all don't do this in that? And, you know, I got I got hurt the beginning of June, the first shift I was off, the crews here caught the aftermath of that, the five young women who were killed by the reckless driver. Right? So, and three of the people working here are classmates, so they all have 23 years and two of them had 20 and 21 years and Tracy is 24 years. Every single one of them said that was the worst thing they've ever seen. And so for us to be able to say, as a group, you know, as a consensus, it was the worst call, like the bag of the bag of memories that I have. And it doesn't, they don't bother me, like, but they're real. Like, that's the promise. Like, I'm not haunted by them, but they are fucking a real. And so for someone who's glib or someone who's dismissive, that's where the spikes come out. You know, and it's kind of like, I will open your fucking eyes and pour the screams, the sorrow, the blood, the broken bones, the ruined lives. I will fucking drown you with them because you're being a stupid fuck and you're being, you're being insensitive. It takes Jeremy until 2018, nearly 20 years into his career, to realize that this job of his had caused him trauma. He was asked to speak on a panel about resilience, along with the panelists who had survived sexual assault and one who had survived the collapse of the 35 W bridge into the Mississippi River. And at the time, I said, yeah, I don't really know why I'm here. Like, I'm just kind of trauma adjacent. And then, as it turned out, about two weeks later, I participated in a sleep and resilient study. So people that you were doing is about six of us firefighters are talking. And I realized that where for years, people talked about PTSD. You know, you have a bad call and it's generally a dead baby or a dying baby who then's dead. But you go to some call that haunts you. And that's, you know, in the literature I'd read, this, you know, like, and the story is it's that one bad call you're haunted. And I was like, wait a second. I'm not haunted by any single dead baby, but I've had multiple dead babies. And I was like, oh, this is a career with nothing, but trauma. And you store it up and you store it up. And there's not really a productive or healthy way to get rid of it. And you have to keep coming to work. And that's really what I've spent, you know, the past four years, five years now, really working on is looking at all the ways that we carry this concept of who we are. And how that dissonance leads to a Trojan horse of trauma, right? So that when you asked me like, in those first six months, or did I, I was like, no, but when I, and I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I've done some peer counselor training for, specifically for the fire service. But most of a lot of the people will talk and say, you know, I'm just haunted. We went to that car crash. I just, I just, I wish I could have done something or I feel I blame myself for not having been able to do more. And I'm like, were you driving the car that hit them? You weren't. You got called when you got called. You showed up when it already happened. It already happened. But I think because of this, this mythos of being firefighters, being heroes, being able to solve things, people buy into that. And that's when it looks like so our turnout gear, all the big bulky gear becomes kind of emblematic, but it's also an armor. But there are a lot of people in there who feel like frauds. It's like this sense of them trying to be this thing. That thing is a hero, which is not a title Jeremy would use for himself, but it is one that's been foisted upon him and his colleagues and plenty of other professions. It's a title we give, of course, as a compliment. Heroes are not like the rest of us or so small and helpless and in need of saving. Heroes are the ones we turn to to save us to fix things. Heroes are the ultimate grown-ups in a world full of children. And there is something lonely about that. And something dehumanizing too. The cost of being a hero is evident in every superhero story. Batman can never be truly known by any of the women he falls in love with. The Hulk is destined to wander the earth alone. Spider-Man is cursed in every universe to lose the people that he loves the most. If the title and the responsibility is too much even for fictional heroes, imagine what it's like for the ones in the real world. In the early days of the pandemic, we launched a lot of job titles up to hero status. Doctors, nurses, teachers, frontline workers, I'm going off the top of my head here and I am not disparaging any of that good work. I participated in it. I liked videos of people banging pots and pans at night to let these people know wherever they were and whoever they were saving that we saw them, that we appreciated them. But underneath every hero from your favorite nurse to on Spider-Man is really just a person, a person who is going to work and doing their job. And we don't really get training. We don't talk about how we're supposed to deal with, but many of the people I've talked to have had traumatic issues. They really focus on the sense that I feel like a failure. Like I should have done more and I'm like, but that's, like I'm mad at myself when I fuck up. Like if I mess up on a call, if I misread somebody, I beat the shit out of myself on it and then I come back and I learn from it and I keep going. But I really am quite clear about human behavior and gravity, right? And biology, like we have such a culture of denial. So I come and see your grandmother on her way down. The family loves her grandmother. They want her to be just as she is. She keeps going to the hospital. She's risking getting sepsis, MRSA, CDIF, pneumonia. There's nothing to solve dying. We're all going to die. But the hospital's the medical system keeps sending her home. Maybe she gets a different infection. Maybe she's not recovering. You, the family are hung up on. I want my beloved granny to be the way she's always been. I take one look at her and saying this human being is dying. She's running out of daylight. I'm not necessarily going to be able to have that conversation with you because you all are in a paradigm of framework where she's alive and well. I take one look at her and say she's dying. I will incur the anger of your denial being savaged if I push it. But that also means I end up being on the floor doing compressions on somebody who has fatal cancer. I will desecrate a corpse because the family couldn't bring themselves to do a DNR, DNI because the doctor couldn't bring him or herself to be honest with the family. So that's the stuff where it either breaks your heart or you understand the human circus of it all and get jaded but still find a way to stay present. I'm Nora McNeerney. This is Terrible Thanks for Asking. Jeremy Norton is a Minneapolis firefighter and the author of the new memoir Trauma sponges dispatches from the scarred heart of emergency response. This is Jeremy's first book. It is out with a small press, the University of Minnesota press and we will link to it in our show description because Jeremy has been a part of our Terrible Thanks for Asking community for years since the beginning and he wrote something really beautiful and something that we think that you would really, really like. Terrible Thanks for Asking is a production of Feelings and Co. We are an independent podcast company. Feelings and Co is where you can find your feelings where you can get feelings of all kinds. If there's a feeling we've got it. We're an independent show so what helps us is you being here listening to us, rating, reviewing it, sharing episodes with your friends, telling people about the work that we are doing. You can also support us by joining our Patreon over at patreon.com slash TTFA or subscribing on Apple+. Both are ways to get bonus content, to get ad free episodes, to get access to our entire back catalog. Over on Patreon we have every episode of Terrible Thanks for Asking painstakingly organized by Topic which has been impossible to do in any other platform but we figured it out and we did it over there. It's also a place to connect with each other. We've got a few different levels that you can join at for different benefits. We're doing live video chats in there and more. More little fun surprises happen over on the Patreon. Our team here is Marcel Malikibu Nora McInerney. That's I just said my own name in the third person, G's Louise. Claire McInerney, yes relation, Megan Palmer and Michelle Plantin. Our supporting producers are Kim Morris, Bethany Nickerson, Rachel Humphrey, Jamie Zimmerman and David Far. Supporting producers are listeners who support us at the highest level over at our Patreon. That's patreon.com slash TTFA. We welcomed a bunch of new teradactyls to the Patreon. Guess that's what we say is teradactyls, Megan made it up including Katrina Husky, Amy Moore, Dale Gattis, Lindsey Pollack, Cita Timmons, Julie Haggihara, Ashley Ashley R, Jane Ebersvilleur, Justin Berry, Dina Freeman, Amanda Daniels, Madeline Fisher, Kelly Walker, and Sherry Hart. That's my mother-in-law everybody. That's so sweet. Thank you, share bear. Thank you for being a part of things. You can find all of our other work, our shows, our store, over at feelingsand.co. I'm Nora McHenry, and it's going to be okay. My very earliest memory is of my cousin's face. We're one, maybe two years old, so we're little, and he's being held in his mother's arms against the backdrop of her torso in a black swimsuit. We're happy. They are in the water in our mother's arms and the therapeutic pool kept at body temperature at our very first swim lessons. I don't think we actually learned to swim at that age, but the point was that we were becoming comfortable in the water. That we got the gist of what it meant to be literally in our heads. He immersed in an element that land mammals aren't accustomed to. Also, it was fun. I instantly loved swimming and like any good minisoten, I would swim in any body of water at any time. A semi-heated indoor pool at a crusty holiday in in rural Minnesota. Hand me my goggles. Lake Superior in late June when the air temperature was barely above 60 and the water felt like icicles stabbing into our flesh. I'm not getting out until I'm hypothermic literally. Our grandparents had a cabin in northern Minnesota on a glacial lake so deep that the water looked black. From the dock, my cousins would look like heads floating in the dark. Their lips tinged blue. Water, my parents taught me, is to be respected. It is both a source of life and an unfeeling force that can take your life. It is a necessary element for our survival, and you could easily not survive it. My children, I hoped, would love to swim as much as I did. I imagine them discovering the magic of realizing that you can float, that you can propel yourself forward, backward, turn some ourselves, feel weightless and held by water. And so for years and years, starting when he was a baby, I signed my son up for swim lessons. Somewhere I got in the pool with him, like my mother and my aunt did with me and my cousin. Somewhere he lined up at the side of the pool with a bunch of other kids and refused to get in. Just refused. Flat out said no. No, thank you. Maybe sometimes he'd get in, but refused to let go of the wall. Sometimes he might agree to kick or blow a bubble, but would not float on his back, even with assistance. And I was bummed out. You're not supposed to put these kinds of expectations on your child, but I thought this was a pretty reasonable one. I wasn't expecting him to be the next Michael Phelps. I just wanted him to be able to swim safely without clinging to my body, and to have as much fun as possible doing it. It was time, of course, to give up. These lessons would be the last ones. He would swim when he wanted to. It would come in time, or he would just be a guy who wore a life vest his whole life, which is totally fine. Who cares? There are bigger problems for a person to have. So I sat on the edge of a warm therapeutic pool and watched his very last lesson. Outside, a Minnesota winter was dumping thick, white snow all over the parking lot. Inside, I sat there sweating and watching. The final test was for him to paddle from the little plastic stand in the middle of the pool to the edge where I sat watching. The water was shallow enough that he could stand up if he needed to, but he never stood up. He paddled and he kicked and he inched his way forward only his face above water. When I say only his face, I mean only his face, his nose, his eyes, his mouth, barely out of the water. And his face was pure happiness even as water splashed into his eyes. He was swimming just barely, but he was doing it. He made eye contact with me, and he said, look, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, look, I'm surviving. I'm surviving. He was surviving. He survived. He made it to the edge of that pool, and into that big, warm towel that was waiting for him. The one other child in his swim class congratulated him on his survival, forgetting their weeks long rivalry over who would be the first to swim to the wall unassisted. And you know what? He can actually swim now. This kid can die for pennies at the bottom of any pool, but honestly, who cares? Because what he did that day was worthy of all the applause and all the praise in the world. When was the last time you shouted for joy for just getting through something? Like, have you ever, as an adult, probably not? We have really high standards, and why would you celebrate barely clearing the bar? I'll tell you why, because survival is no small thing. When things are good, or standards get higher, but when you're struggling, you know that clearing the bar is the goal. When you're watching a white blood cell count, when you're hoping that check clears, when you're praying for relief of any kind, every time you get to the edge of the metaphorical pool, every time your hands finally grasp at the metaphorical, solid edge of safety, it's suddenly enough. May we remember that sense of relief when things are good and safe again? May we remember that our survival is no small thing, and when we can't keep our whole head above water, may our face be enough. Look at us. We're surviving. Good job. I'm Nora Mcnerney, and it's going to be okay. This episode was written and recorded by me at Nora Mcnerney in my closet and produced by Megan Palmer and Claire Mcnerney. It's going to be okay. Is it production of Feelings and Co, who also brought you terrible things for asking? Our team is Marcel Malikibu, Jordan Turgen, Megan and Claire, Eugene Kid, Larissa Witcher, and me. Our theme music is by Secret Audio. We are an independent show. We are made possible by listeners like you, so thank you for listening to this. If you rate, review, and share our show, it will help us so much. I really desperately want to hear what makes you feel like it's going to be okay. You can call us and share at 612-568-4441. You can email me at IGTBO at Feelingsand.co. That's Feelings, AMD.co. We'll also have that in our show notes. I really do think it's going to be okay. Whatever it is. We'll see you tomorrow.