Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 245 - Rick Bucher

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Rick Bucher was a Firefighter/Paramedic/Rescue Tech for 27 years in Scottsdale, AZ, and retired after committing suicide in 2019.  Rick didn't know that he had PTSD or didn't realize the extent of it until after his suicide, and he is now stepping forward not only to bring awareness to the issue in the first responder community but to help break the stigma associated with coming out of the shadows and asking for help.  That stigma is costing our military and first responder communities lives every day, not to mention the effect that loss has on our friends, coworkers and family.   

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Stop fucking about. And that's it. I'm on the business side of the house. My guest today is Rick Booker. and I'm going to warn you guys up front. This is a heavy one. Fascinating story, but it's a story of a man who had a lot on his plate.

Rick was a firefighter paramedic rescue tech for 27 years in Scottsdale, Arizona. And he retired after he committed suicide in 2019. You might ask, how is he sitting here having a conversation with me? Well, you're going to find out in the episode. There's a lot to unpack, and I think Rick does a fantastic job. explaining who he is, where he come from, where he comes from, what he was dealing with, and what he has learned going through the crucible of his life so far. So with that, I'm going to leave you to it. Episode number 245 with Rick Booker.

Enjoy. I'm looking at danger close now. Well, thank you for, first off, reaching out and second off, you know, coming up here to sit down. So you've got one podcast under your belt. I had two. Two. We're going to call those warm-ups. Let's call it one and a half. Okay. Fair enough.

Where would you like to begin? Your story is an interesting one for sure. How would you like to get into it? We could just start at the beginning. Okay. First there was light. Or do you not want to go that far? I don't want to go. Well, that wasn't really my story.

But I was born in Effingham, Illinois. adopted when I was four days old. Parents were living in, I believe, Atlanta, Georgia at the time. Shortly after that, they relocated the family to Fort Worth, Texas, and that's pretty much where I grew up. Okay. So from like age 0.5 till 14, I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. basic middle class upbringing

grew up across the street from a golf course grew up golfing it's one of the most frustrating activities that I've ever invested time in oh yeah and I've thrown many clubs and I haven't golfed since the 80s or 90s I went down the rabbit hole briefly for I'd say about two years the amount of time that I was spending to shave one stroke off per round, at some point you realize

this is a game for insane people. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is. I did enjoy watching explosions on the golf course, finding a nice nine iron, bent in a half in the garbage can. I took pleasure in other people's

suffering on that one. Yeah. So I golfed a little, you know, I kind of grew up on the golf course a little bit. I was kind of a weird kid. I played alto sax in the band. And I played a defensive end on the football field.

And I played catcher on the baseball diamond. So I did two of those three. I played alto sax, not in the band. Really? I mean, I don't share everything. I don't know if I've ever talked about that. My mother forced me to play saxophone. Let me just tell you, I can play the theme song to Star Wars like a motherfucker.

Nice. Not anymore, but I used to be able to. I'm sure there's a picture out there somewhere of me. I actually do remember, God, was I in the band? I remember marching in, God damn. We were living in Sebastopol, California at the time. And I distinctly remember marching down the middle of the road, so I feel like I was in the band.

Yeah. Well, if you weren't in the band. If I wasn't in the band, I was there to like, who is this kid? Yeah. But he's doing really good on the Star Wars thing. Star Wars sounds great. I also played catcher for baseball. What the hell?

Yeah. Okay, you're going to find, we do actually have several things in common. Okay. No soccer for me, though. When I was younger and it never stuck with me. I went the water polo and baseball route. Okay. Was soccer the opposing season from baseball?

I remember kind of doing them all at once. Yeah, because I kind of had to choose. A lot has happened since then, and a lot of my memory has been pretty fucked up by periods of hypoxia. Yeah. Fair. There's a lot that I remember, but some that I don't. play basketball too. Okay.

My dad, my adoptive father, pushed me towards sports at an early age because that's what he did. He was all through school. He was an athlete and then he went on to play minor league baseball afterwards. So naturally he kind of thrust me into those things. What he wasn't good at was teaching me the rules. So it was go play, but just,

somehow intrinsically know how to do it, which in an interesting way drove me to, I'm banging on the table, sorry, no worries. In an interesting way, it drove me to a point where I wanted to be an instructor for multiple different things later in my life. And I didn't really put those two together until, you know, kind of late when I realized, wow, I'm wanting to share my knowledge because I needed someone to share their knowledge and I missed out on that. So good for the most part. Great upbringing. I would say my parents were present but not available if that makes sense. It does. And I wish I could say I think that that's not the norm, but I think especially

in the modern what the world I grew into as a parent and seeing other parents. And for full clarity. I have, I have fallen into that trap as well, too. I think it's more the norm than the anomaly. Yeah. Yeah. It's easy. It's easy to dedicate all of your time and energy elsewhere. It's never been easier because you can put an iPad or a phone in your kid's hand and drive all day on a cross-country road trip and not have them fussing about stuff like my sister and I did in the backseat of the 79 Cadillac, you know, screaming, are we there yet the whole day? You know what's crazy about the modern technology, too, is that you don't have to teach the kids how to use it. If you were to give an iPad out of the box to probably a five or six year old, just hand it back over the seat. And you were to do an all-day drive, the things they would be doing on that thing by the end of the day would exceed what my father is currently able to do on his electronic devices. And that's the beauty of their design.

It's amazingly intuitive. intuitive yeah it's the it's one edge of the double edge sword because the beauty of that design the seamless way that it works it's ergonomic the colors is bright it's fun to use good luck trying to get a teenager to put one down i have three teenagers i can tell you exactly uh it's their it's not their soul social connection to the world but it is a cornerstone of their social connection and i've actually gone back and forth in my own head on this you know know, for me, high school, the highest level of education that I was successfully able to achieve, hanging out in the courtyard at the brakes, not rotary, although I do remember rotary phones,

and if people want to get an absolute laugh, go onto YouTube and they do videos where they're trying to get modern era teenagers to use a rotary phone. It's fucking hilarious. So it was, not even cell phones at that point, but it was like wall-mounted phones. I think I had a pager when I was It's not yet, no big deal, a major in high school. And that would like passing notes in class. But I utilized all of those to the maximum extent possible. And if you had given me a cell phone and I could connect to my friends like that, I think I would have as well. So I'm, I battle with myself as a parent between the healthy boundaries and the realization that, okay, it's a different medium than I had growing up.

And it's actually really cool because they can communicate with people all over the world. But what's not cool about it is they can't detach from it. And if they always have it on and it becomes like a fifth appendage for them, the inescapableness of all of the negative things that can come from it as well. So I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out. Based on the amount of gray you have, you're probably, what, four or five years younger than me? How old are you, Andy? How old are you first?

I'll be 50 next month. I will be 45 in October, so you were right on. Okay. Yeah. Maybe genetically I was just more of the same. I'm not a fucking genius. I figured high school plus pager, yeah, I'd been out of high school about five years before. Yeah.

I got the pager to get page to Wildland fire calls and all that shit. I did not have a lot of gray hair until actually I had a little bit. But I think five or six years ago, it just was like this is the way your hair is now. I see people trying to fight it. I like mine. I don't care. I mean, I have plenty of free time. I'm going to allocate 0% of it to dyeing my fucking hair.

Right. First off, people who have died here, let me just tell you, I know it's died, you know it's died, and everybody else that sees you knows that it's died. So they can just dispense with that bullshit. No, you know, this is how I look at it. I earned every one of these gray hairs. Yeah. And I'm proud of them.

I don't know if I would go as far to say that I am proud of my gray hair. I just, my bucket of fucks is relatively empty when it comes to things like that. Yeah. So I'll save those for other things. So, all right. So middle class family was present but not available. Did any of them come from fire service background at all? Or was that something new for you?

No. In fact, the first real fire experience that I really remember having, like where I was aware of the fire department. Two things. We used to go to the fire department of Fort Worth. and buy our trash bags. Really? Yeah, it was, I don't know, part of the, part of a city program or something, and we bought our trash bags at the fire department.

Was there something special about it? They were fireproof, no. I was saying, did they have like a logo or something? Nothing. I don't know. It's a grocery store item. Yeah, clearly. But I do have a picture of me when I was probably about five or six years old in the front seat

of a, in the driver's seat of Fort Worth, Texas. fire engine. I actually looked at it the other day and realized, wow, it was in there from a long time ago. After that, kind of the next thing I really remember was our storage shed behind the house catching fire while we were gone

one day. And as the family is driving back to the house, we're following a fire truck running Code 3. Unknowly to your house? Yeah. Hey, they turned where we're going. They turned again where we're going. Oh, shit. There's a column of smoke coming up from behind the house.

So they go in there and basically stamp it out. How does it start? I have no idea. My dad was a smoker, though, and there was a lawnmower and gas and all that shit in there. Who knows? Yeah. We almost had an incident like that at one of the houses that we lived in. But it's because I was playing with matches on the side of the house.

And thankfully, the dog bowl was full of water. Otherwise, we might have had an incident like that as well. My parents never found out about that. So, Dad, if you're listening to this, that's my bad. Yeah, sorry. You know what? Fire is a natural, that's a natural thing that people have had to learn about since it existed. So, you know, for kids to do stuff with fire is pretty normal as far as I'm concerned.

Relatively dangerous, though. Like outside right now, there's a huge fire just south of here. smoky out there. My house is under two miles from the leading edge of that fire and it's blowing towards it. Do we need to leave? No. Okay. There's nothing I can do. It's the road to the house. It's completely... A bottle of water right here. Completely locked down. So we'll see. Today or tomorrow. So the next 24 to 48 hours will be determining whether or not that thing burns to the ground. Okay. We were watching one to the north yesterday over a ridge line that was blowing. And then this morning it seemed like they got a hold of it because there's nothing.

So were you looking down towards the lake? No. The one, the billowing smoke plumes yesterday. Yeah. That was the Elmo fire. Okay. Which. Is that the one you're talking about?

Yeah. I might be turned around and looking the wrong direction. I think you pretty much were. I wasn't going to say anything about it, though. Sometimes north is south and south is north. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. No, you're in a new area. And I think the reason you can't see the smoke is that the wind direction has shifted

a little bit. Yesterday it was much more of a southern wind, so it was blowing it from where it was. I think it has shifted it out of the west a little bit. And if it stays out of the west, I'm not a fire science guy by any stretch. However, let me tell you, over the last 48 hours, my knowledge of fire and fire science has drastically increased in the middle of grabbing things from the house and pulling it out and putting into storage. But I think if the wind, one, it needs to dry it's like gusting to 25 out there which it's brutal horrible fire conditions low low relative humidity super dry it was been in the 90s for the past few days it's still in the in the mid to high 80s but i'm just hoping if the wind is at least pushing it in the opposite direction or parallel we'll see

yeah so they they fight really hard to protect homes so unless something pretty weird happens you're going to be okay you're you're i don't want to to fight too hard. I have some buddies who have been updating. It's like, listen, I have insurance. How's your insurance? Yeah. I have USAA, which I have no relationship with them other than being a consumer, but I've had nothing but great

interactions with them. And I'll text the guys like, hey, it's just a fucking house. Like, I got the irreplaceable stuff out of there. Please don't put yourself at risk at all, but also do a good job. Sacrifice yourself, but like, you know, like an arm.

Like, don't die, but if you need to... Don't get completely burned over, just... If you need to sacrifice your legs to save my house, I mean, that's what's expected of you. Yeah, so fire can be fun, except for when it's like it is right now. And, of course, man started fire. Here's the thing. We walked out of the place that we're staying at this morning, and I could smell the smoke. And Lynn mentioned something about smelling.

And I said, yeah, you know what that still smells like to me? money. Yeah. It really does. Yeah. Because when I first started with the fire department, we'll get to it, but I was making more money than I ever had when I was doing wildland for the first couple of years. Oh, overtime? Not even overtime.

Just getting called out to those federal fires. Yeah, I was working as a seasonal for the Tono National Forest. But then I was also working for rural metro, which was the private corporation that provided fire. coverage for the city of Scottsdale at the time. So that was my first fire job. But yeah, that's down the road a little bit. Back to Fort Worth. My dad gets laid off from his job and moves to Scottsdale, Arizona,

and takes a job with, at the time, Motorola in 87. The family stayed behind. My mom, sister, and I took care of the house. took care of the yard, made sure everything looked great while the place was for sale. And seven or eight months later, it sold, and we all relocated to Scottsdale. How were you at that time? Let's see. I was 14.

Okay. Yeah. Middle of my freshman year of high school. That's the worst. Terrible time to relocate. Yeah. Yeah. High school is rough as it is.

Yeah. Leaving in the middle of your freshman year and showing up as the new guy halfway through. Yeah, it was tough. Yeah. It was tough. But I had some things kind of built in. I'd been racing BMX and came out to Scottsdale, did a little bit of BMX at the track there, but realized, okay, at some point I'm going to be too big for this 20-inch bike. And I've seen these people riding road bikes, 10 speeds, all over the place. What's that all about? The way I got into that was when my dad moved to Scottsdale, he said, hey, son, if you take care of the house, just, you know, be the man of the house.

When you move in, we'll get you a scooter. We'll get you a moped. I was like, a deal. Let's do it. It's called bribery, but I support it. Fair enough. Yeah. Especially if you're going to get a moped.

What? No problem. Right. And my friends had motorcycle. So, you know, dirt bikes. And so we moved to Scottsdale and I said, hey, so how about this moped thing? He said, that's too dangerous here. But I'll get you a new bike.

Not with a motor? Okay. So we kind of welched on that deal. I understand being concerned for safety with, you know, motorized device. But at 14, you can't. you know, draw those conclusions. It's not in your ability. Correct.

I just felt wronged. Well, your dad also probably had arrived at that realization before he made the initial moped promise as it was anyway. So. Yeah, for sure. It's a dad move. So we go to the bike shop and I pick out a road bike. And I say 10 speed because most people know what a 10 speed is,

but a road bike like Lance Armstrong road bike, I rode the fuck out of that thing But were you wearing spandex? I was wearing lycra It's different Andy Spandex, Likra Equally unacceptable

In most communities But in the cycling community Totally fine Okay Hey I had I had girlfriends Everything's cool That became my escape vehicle

I rode like crazy right explored started riding with groups started racing and like I said I had raced BMX so racing wasn't new this was just something different so I got into into road bike racing and I did that for 30 years is that mostly set distance up and down but you're on wildly variable hard pack the whole time the right asphalt or Well, so I raced mountain bikes for, I raced mountain bikes for about 28 years and rode for 30. Okay. Sometimes on the same weekend.

Yeah. It was a huge part of my life. Yeah. I was a cyclist who also was a firefighter, who also was a bike shop employee who also, but I thought of myself as a bike racer. So, yeah, I had had a ton of success. with that. I actually won more races than I even know. I raced at a professional level. Never won a mountain bike race because with my size, I'm a sprinter, and you've got to be able to climb hills if you're going to win a mountain bike race. That makes sense. Yeah. Oddly,

I loved training on the mountain bike, because that's more me ripping down single track and jumps and drops and all that stuff than just going out on the road and riding no bullshit 20 plus hours a week to train which translated into a knowledge of training that I was able to apply to other parts of my life later on so yeah road bike racing taught me probably more in my adolescent and well teenage years and young adult years than anything else in my life. And that's the beauty of competition, I think, because it teaches you the importance of preparation for bike racing equipment maintenance, but it's also a huge team sport. Road racing seems like an individual sport, but if you can put five guys together that know

how to work with each other in a pro field, they will decimate. everybody. Yeah. As long as they're all fit and can perform. So I learned the importance of teamwork, leadership, the ability to follow leadership, set an example, you know, all these things. And travel. That's how I learned how to travel.

You also had to learn how to deal with winning and losing. Oh, yeah. One of the things that I think is probably the most dangerous is this idea that there are no winners and losers when it comes to sporting competitions and that everybody should be celebrated equally. I understand conceptually how people can and can attach themselves to that. Like, oh, okay. Yeah, that's better. Nobody's going to have hard feelings and we're all going to have an equal sense of self-worth. Cool. Until you get into that non-arbitrary, competitive sporting world environment and you enter into the real world and nobody gives a shit

about your feelings. And... Okay, speaking of feelings, think about this. What, um, let's, Let's think about what it feels like to win. Awesome. It's gratifying. It's great. You just revel in it, bathe in it. Does it motivate you? I think for some people it can because they want to continue to feel that way.

Sure, but does it motivate you as much as losing? For myself, personally, no. No. And it shouldn't. Yeah. There have to be people that don't care about competition and they lose and just kind of think, All right, whatever. I think somewhere deep down when they're wearing lipstick in the shower, they do care about.

It comes out. It comes out. I don't. I've met quite a few people throughout the course of my life. Some seem to care less. But it seems like it might be activity dependent. You can find an activity that they will care very much about. For sure.

About losing. Yeah. Dungeons and dragons. Yeah. It's in there for all of us somewhere. And for me, losses are like a cigarette lighter burn on your arm, whereas victories would be maybe more like watching a movie. Once the credits roll, you're like, oh, next. But that burn, you're like, son of a bitch.

I don't want that to happen again. Right. You have to learn how to win and you have to learn how to lose. And there's a difference between a good winner and a bad winner. Yeah. There's a definite difference in a good loser and a bad loser. Believe me, I lost, you know, from second place down. I lost more bicycle races and motorcycle races and everything than I have won.

And I definitely have learned more from those experiences. But I've also won enough to have some enough practice at winning to know how to be a gracious winner. And in a way that I can show appreciating. for the people that I compete against because without them I wouldn't be motivated to do what I do. So all that rolled in it.

I mean, this is shit that I've learned through racing. And I've allowed racing to teach me over the years. I've said it a few times on the podcast before. A lot of people want to specifically talk about my old previous military career. And the lessons that I have, had refined in that occupation, I learned all of them playing competitive sports.

That was my actual introduction to those things and then went into a wood chipper, which turned into like a precision lathe because they were looking for certain things. Yeah. But it wasn't anything new. It was, you know, the sports I played grown up, I did junior lifeguards on the beach because I'm from a beach town and baseball and water polo. All individual, you have your individual position as part of the team. I won in four years of playing water polo in high school one game.

One fucking game. We have one more games in that in like a tournament setting, but in the actual season, we beat one team one time. That's rough. Yeah, but you know what? There were some lessons learned from that. Sure. But you experience winning in that, you remember ABC sports, the wide world of sports, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. that you got to feel the thrill of victory.

So here's something crazy. After I won a race, whether there's a bike race or a motorcycle race, quite frequently, I would cross the finish line and go into the next corner or whatever with tears of my eyes. Because I just, I felt this very strong emotion

when I won. And it was for a couple different reasons. You could say that it was a sense of relief, like, oh, I don't have to worry about losing now. But it was also that sense of accomplishment that all the preparation, all the sacrifice, all the things that I didn't do as a kid growing up paid off in the end. or all of the things that I didn't do as an adult for fun instead went out training and worked on my equipment and all that dedicated myself diet extra all that stuff it paid off so there was there was always this this really strong emotion of gratitude and just there's there's just nothing like winning particularly something that you've really suffered to do that

emotional response makes total sense. If you didn't have that feeling, I think I would actually be concerned because like you said, you're getting the return on your investment of time, energy, effort, the quality of, well, not necessarily quality of life, but people who are competing and they are dedicating themselves like that, they are saying no to a lot of things that their average age peer group are not. And so you miss some potential opportunities. And it's not like those are invisible to you. I'm like, fuck, I really wish I could go out. So yeah, that's, emotional release when it's all at the end of the day you see that micro step in the right direction all lead into that victory yeah that makes total sense and it the beauty of of racing is that

you can translate you can apply the lessons that you learn through racing elsewhere in life so um kind of grew up working in bike shops in arizona when we moved here because that's what I knew. I think my first job was like 13 years old, 13 years old bus and tables in Fort Worth. And I did wait tables in Arizona for a few years. But yeah, mostly bicycle shop stuff. And that's how I got in the fire service. I'll need a little bit more explanation than that.

Here we go. Because bike service working in a bike shop and that's how I got into the fire service. Like, what are you talking about? Unless there was a fire house like a cross- the street then I can see that. Or a fire in the bike shop? Yeah. No, there was a firefighter in the bike shop.

So one of the guys, yeah, one of the guys that worked part-time at the bike shop that I was at was a Phoenix firefighter. Did he have a mustache? I think he might have. I mean, isn't it required? I grew one in after I got out. I've seen backdraft. All right. There's some quality dusters.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I call him dick brooms, but that's a personal term that a lot of, yeah. Yeah. The firefighters here have legendary stashes. Oh, yeah, and they come down as, it just is, here's the thing with a firefighter mustache. You can't grow it all the way. You can't grow a full beard because the mask.

Because, yeah, your mask has to seal on, on bare skin. So guys will push that mustache all the way down to the very edge of their jaw line. No, Chief, it'll still work. Yeah. I am not an expert in the fire service, but I feel like some of the guys. up here are not getting the cleanest seal. If you were to look at their mask, you might see smoke, like, just walking around there. And I think they're totally fine with it.

They're like, yeah, do they just take it off? Yeah, fine. Yeah. That is one of the stereotypes, the mustaches and firefighters. Damn, that one is true. Yeah, ours was mustaches and Oakley's. Of course. Yeah.

One of the guys at the bike shop worked part-time of the bike shop. He was a Phoenix firefighter, and he said, hey anybody wants to come do a ride along sometime knock yourself out let me know i was the only one that took him up on it i show up on a saturday i think and nothing happened we went to the grocery store came back probably drilled it's you know did some training and stuff um lunch goes by dinner goes by and I'm getting ready to get out of there and the alarm goes off for a working fire. So we run out to the truck, climb in, and before I know it, we're driving down the wrong side of the road, lights and siren going, and my buddy and his partner in the back of the truck, putting all their gear on,

getting their air packs going. We pull up in front of a house that's got black smoke pumping out of the front door and windows. they pull a line disappear inside put the fire out come out high five and they're taking their gear off they're covered in you know insulation and basically backdrop dry wall you were there as they were shooting the movie backdraft basically but there was actually smoke at this fire yeah that is true there wasn't a lot of smoke in that movie wasn't no it wouldn't make sense it's tough on the visual medium just close your eyes that's what it would look like yeah um so At that point, I was in life. I had graduated high school.

I was going to community college. Take in classes for a business degree that I did not want. But my dad worked in the business field, so I thought, well, I guess I'm going to try that. So we run that call, and I thought I had found what I wanted to do. And that was when the pursuit starts. What age were you for that ride-along? At that point, I'm 18. Yeah.

It's a very impressionable time to have said right along an experience. For sure. And I'm at a point where I'm kind of rebelling against my parents in a lot of different ways. And being adopted puts in a whole different variable in a family. I'm going through kind of some identity stuff like, who am I? Where am I from? And they told me at a very different variable. very early age that I was adopted.

I was just going to ask you, when did they, when and how did they tell you about that? I think they told me about first grade and there was a girl in my first grade class and they had, they pointed out that she was adopted and they said, you guys are both adopted. Is there any benefit to, I feel like your processing ability in first grade is, I mean, it's obviously not what it will develop into. I don't know. Dude, think about what you would do. Like, okay, do we want to wait until he's a teenager and tell him?

And then he can be really pissed and ask, why didn't you tell me sooner? Or do we want him to get to those teenage years and just kind of think to himself, this is what I've always known? Because he pros and cons to both. Right. And there is no, there's not really a right answer, I don't think. I mean, certainly there are some professionals that are a lot smarter than me that would say, this is the best way to do it.

This is the best age to do that. So I'm assuming in first grade it was, I mean, in first grade, I'm sure I was eating paste and probably crayons. So the concept of what being, what adoption means. You ate crayons too? I'm not sure that I ate crayons. I mean, not too. But knowing. Like I did too, I just stopped at paste.

Yeah, knowing myself, there's a good chance. I at least have one as an appetizer. All right. probably more than once. Did you ever get to come across to scented crayons? No, but that sounds like an appetizer. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. Of the people in this room, trust me. I know exactly where I fall out when it comes intellectually. But that, fuck, that is such a, that's such a large concept of wrap your head around. there are a lot of things about being adopted that you don't even that most people don't even conceptualize is there a is there a cancer history in my family is there a mental health issue in my family um is there a bike racer in my family like what what drives what drives me to be who i am and to do

what i do and to feel what i feel when did you start asking yourself those questions In the first grade, as soon as they said, you're adopted, and then I kind of went, I think I probably asked him what's adopted. Yeah. And they explained that, but they also explained with great clarity, we love you just as much as if, you know, you were our own. This complicated things. Nine months after they adopted me, they had a daughter of their own. Do you think maybe that's part of where my competitive drive comes from? Was that your only sibling?

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I have one sibling as well as a sister. Yeah. There was a competition for attention, I think, more than anything else. Which I think is normal for any kid. You know, I can understand or I think I can understand how the additional layer of the adoption tied into that as well.

They, have you ever sought, or do you even want to know anything about your biological parents? Have you ever sought to be in contact with them or get more information about them? Parts of that are going to come in later in the story. Yeah. So, yeah, I just, I competed with my sister a lot growing up. And then when I got to my mid to late teens and I'm in. involved in bike racing. I was raised Catholic.

I was an altar boy. Nothing weird. Yep. My parents had my sister become the first female altar server in our church because they wanted her to not feel excluded. We both played in the band. I made first chair alto sacks in Fort Worth, Texas when I was in middle school and she was whatever,

a sixth chair flute. But music has kind of been in me. That was very natural for me. That kind of brings up the nature versus nurture thing. I have experienced both. And I'll explain that in a bit. But I can tell you that nature is really strong. I mean,

that it's, yeah, you can look at DNA and all that stuff, but you can compare that to the nurture and how someone is raised, and it overpowers it in a big way. At least it did for me. People won't like that because they want to feel like they can always level the playing field. Again, it's another, I think that's another concept or lie that we tell ourselves. There are people who won the fucking genetic lottery. Oh, yeah, for sure.

but that doesn't you still have to work for it you can still take somebody who's genetically gifted and turn it into a garbage disposal but that person there are people out there I don't care the nurturing environment you could have every tutor every coach you're never going to achieve that level

and that's the sticks kid that's the way that it works the world isn't fair here's the thing with that genetic lottery there's 50 states there's 50 different state lotteries somebody won the football lottery for genetics.

But somebody also won the math lottery. Yeah. And the science lottery and the music lottery. There are a lot of different genetic permutations that lead people down different roads. Something led me to walk into a fire station and basically walk into the captain's office and ask him if there were any jobs there. I think that's something might have been your ride-along. It was.

It was. If I had to put a finger on it. Yeah. The company officer that day said, are you an EMT? Nope, I'm not. Well, go to community college and get your EMT. All right, cool. We were actually in between semesters.

I rode my motorcycle down to the community college and signed up that day. A semester later, I went back to that fire station. He's on duty again. I walk in. I'm thinking, here we go. All right. It's fire department time. I don't know if you guys know this, but I'm kind of a big deal.

And I'm here to help out your department. Yeah. God, young men are so stupid. After I said, hey, I got my EMT cert. Any jobs? he asked if I had any fire science classes. Nope. All right, back on the motorcycle, back to community college.

The first class I take is fire hydraulics, which is what experienced firefighters take when it's time to drive the truck and operate the pump at a fire. The instructor told me, who was a battalion chief at the time, said, you're kind of putting the cart before the horse, but let's see how you do.

I got an A in that class too, and then went back to the fire station and thinking, okay, what's it going to be this time? Did you take to the curriculum pretty easy? Yeah, because I've always been kind of a, I've always been a science guy, so the physics of how water works and pressure and all that, perfect.

I could conceptualize it easily. Pretty decent at math. You seem fascinated by the career field too, so you were heading, you know, working steps towards that direction. Absolutely. Relate that to competition. When you win, all of that work pays off.

Well, I'm realizing I haven't won yet, but I'm going to put in the work. Just one thing at a time, let's do this. The nice thing was I had a purpose. I had something that I wanted to do, right? That's what we need in life. Yeah, an anchor. Yeah. I walk in the station.

There's a different captain on duty. Hey, the other guy told me EMT, fire science, I did that. Are you guys hiring? Yes, we are. I just took over the reserve program and we're hiring people. So why don't you show up on Tuesday night? We have a reserve drill and check it out. Cool.

So I walked down there, t-shirt and jeans. There are reserve firefighters in steel-toe boots, blue pants, red shirts, yellow helmets, work gloves. And they're rolling up hose, inch and three-quarter, 100-foot rolls that are about 40 pounds and unrolling them. So they're rolling and unrolling hose. This is the basics, the bare, like, starting point of being a firefighter. And people are completely letting go of the roll and it winds up in a pile.

People are, you know, they get it like halfway out and it falls over. Somebody says, hey, you want to try it? Yeah, sure. throw me a helmet and gloves. And I'd been watching how everybody did it. I'd take a couple steps like I'm bowling and toss the hose. I'm holding onto the two couplings and it pays out perfectly. Wow.

All right, cool. I just touched fire hose. Pretty much a firefighter. Or a helmet. Holy shit. Give me the nozzle. Let's go into that. Somebody burns something.

Let's do this. Yeah. So that captain that told me to come back was out there that night. And they're wrapping up from Drill. And he said, hey, come back on Thursday. So I came back on Thursday. And he said, we've got a spot for you as a reserve. What does that actually mean?

What is a reserve firefighter? Yeah, so many different staffing models and schedules and setups for fire departments all over the country and the world for that matter. The way rural metro that private corporation worked in Scottsdale at the time, and this was this is the night pretty much from the 60s to the 90s. There's a full-time contingent of firefighters and they're supplemented by reserves. In a lot of in the majority of this country, firefighters are volunteers. And you can at first you think, that doesn't sound right.

But if you fly from coast to coast and look out the window, there's a lot of open land. Yeah. That's the volunteer areas. So a reserve firefighter is paid, but only when they're called. Gotcha. Okay. So they're not a full-time employee. They have no benefits.

They're paid for calls. Or if you go do ride-alongs, they'll pay an hour for every call that you go on, which I took advantage of and supplemented my bike shop. Mexican restaurant income. But that reserve process is what gets you through the door to a full-time position. Is there an academy anywhere in that process you have to attend? Most firefighters do one academy when they're hired. I did two.

The first one was to get qualified as a firefighter so that I could work as a reserve and fill in when full-time guys were off or injured. or whatever. And you get shift qualified, and then eventually you're working 24-hour shifts as a reserve. But up until that point, you're responding in your own vehicle with fire gear and you go to fires. And sometimes you get to go inside if it's still, you know, big enough. Otherwise, yeah, you get to a point where you fill in for full-time firefighters.

And then you're basically slave labor because you are working. full-time hours for part-time pay with no benefits. So I think when I started as a reserve, I was making $3.25 an hour. That's the time that I took a couple summers and I worked for the National Forests as a wildland fire fighter also. So I was hustling. I'm doing all these different jobs and moving out of my house. So I'm kind of paying my way, my own way, and I'm getting my feet under me as an adult.

and as a man and as a firefighter. So, yeah, I get hired full-time, and it's off to the races. Did you have to do any additional training to get hired as a wild-in firefighter, or did the academy you went through for the reserve help you with that? Yeah, for all of its shortcomings, rural Metro provided great training. They actually gave you as much training as you were willing to take, and it was all free for the taking. So when I'm a reserve, I'm going to 13190 class, which is basically wildland firefighting and fire behavior.

That also gives you something called a red card, which qualifies you to work on federal fires. And those federal fires paid better than fire on any other land. So that was, you know, that was a big draw for me. Get your red card, get qualified to go out on these wildland fires. So like what's happening right here, there's a website where you can kind of look at it. And the first time it said, I think 200 people assigned, then 300, then 439. Would those be those red card type people that are coming in from adjoining areas? Okay.

Yeah. And in order to get a red card, you have to go through 131.90, which is, you know, that class that you take. They also take something called a pack test. So 40-pound vest It's been a long time since I did this, so bear with me. Four-mile hike In under 45 minutes, I think. It's brisk.

Right at about a 10-minute pace-ish. If you ruck it, you know, if you're at like a ruck pace, you can do it. If you walk it, you're not going to make it. That kind of level of... Not exactly running, but you're not. exactly walking. If you're fit, you can do it. It'll feel like a good workout. Yeah. Really. So yeah, those things get you qualified and then you can get deployed onto federal fires, which paid good, especially because in addition to the red card and the 131.90, I was taking

classes like chainsaw operation, portable water pump operator, four by four training for the fire service, pumps and water, aerial operations to deal with aircraft, firing operations to burn out fuel or back burn and set fires to remove fuel. I'm taking every single class that I possibly can that's offered until I have them all. And before I know it, I'm qualified as a crew boss, sorry, a squad boss so I can manage a group of 10 people within a 20-man hand crew. Then I get qualified. qualified as a crew boss, now I can manage the whole thing. Got qualified as an engine operator and then as an engine boss, so that's kind of the wildland equivalent of a fire captain.

I'm a reserve. And I'm just getting after it. I want everything that I can get. I want every bit of training that I can get. It's awesome because I love being outdoors. I love, I love nature. I love hiking, camping, four-wheel drive, you name it. Yeah, why not have somebody else teach you how to do those things better?

Seriously. And pay me for it. Yeah. Not a huge amount of money, but it's funny that the way I look at it now, now looking back, it's basically a camping trip with landscaping involved. Let me just tell you, I went to some dirt bike riding courses. the difference between how I ride a federally owned dirt bike versus my own is substantial. But the skill set that I learned on bikes, it 100% applies to my personal stuff.

But yeah, I couldn't believe some of the schools that were available. And I was the same way. I wanted to, I'm like, what? You get to learn how to do this? I'm going to get paid while I do this. And I'm going to get geared. Yeah, it was amazing. That was very early on.

And my career was exactly the same way. just every school I could possibly go to. Radio, cool, don't care. And the gear, the tactics, the constant variables that are involved with Wildland, I mean, it's some really dangerous shit. I had a very close call at one point. Had some weird stuff happened in structure fires over the years, too.

But a structure fire is in a box, and eventually it's going to go out when it's out of fuel. But a wildland fire, I mean, that can gobble up tens of thousands of acres of forest really quickly. And it'll burn faster than you can run.

So it's... That's a terrifying thought. Oh, yeah. My fiancé was showing me a video of the fire shelter that they carry and the drill. Oh, wait a minute. You mean the easy bake. I actually,

think she described it in the terms of a baked potato. Because when I saw what came out of that, you know, fanny pack that's on their back for lack of a better term, and the drill that they did and then they just jumped on the ground, it looked like essentially a piece of mylar. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there are, I'm sure there are people whose lives have been saved by that thing. I guess I thought something else was going to come out of that backpack.

I'm not sure what I thought it was going to be. I didn't think it was what came out of there. Yeah, we would train every year with those. Is that just absolute worst case? We're getting ready to get overrun, and you might as well try this because there's nothing else to try? There's three ways to avoid a shit show in a wildland fire. Number one is planning, observation, and decision-making based on the information that you have

with regard to fuel, weather, and topography. And that's a wildland fire triangle, those three things. weather topography. So a good leader is constantly looking at the sky, looking at data, looking at the fire, or has his most experienced firefighter looking at the fire for him and talking to him on the radio. That's the first thing, but good, good planning and leadership. The second is an escape route. So that is a path that will get you to a zone that's safe enough to stand in while the fire burns by. It's not a park with, you know, tree canopy growing over it.

Yeah. Because you could get fried in there under the right conditions. It's somewhere that you could stand and just, and be completely safe. The third is a deployment zone. And that's where the fire shelters would be deployed in the case of inability to escape. And in different fuel types, and what I mean by that is what is on the ground growing, and it varies wildly in the United States, from Alaskan Tundra to Sonoran Desert where I live, to forest here. And the way those things burn is totally different.

But a deployment zone is where you would deploy a fire shelter. and that's what I actually did not have when I almost got burned over. So this was early on as a reserve. I was just about to get hired full time. There's a fire called the Rio Fire in Scottsville. It was the largest wildland fire that's ever burned there in the city limits. And it was big. It was like 26,000 acres, something like that.

Started by a lightning strike during a monsoon storm. And they pretty, much paged everybody on the planet to go fight this thing. So I wind up on a on a brush truck and it's a I don't know, picture like an F350 with a flat bed on the back that's got a couple hundred gallons of water, a pump, tools, chainsaws, that stuff. Seen plenty of those the last few days. Type 6 brush truck. They're awesome. I used to love driving those things because you could just mow down everything. It was awesome.

I'm on one of those with a crew and we're off of a dirt road evaluating housing structures that are going to be exposed to the fire. And the way the wind was blowing, we were looking good. It probably was not going to hit this road. We weren't going to have to protect the structures. Everything was cool. The monsoon storm had a different idea and the wind shifted 90 degrees and blew a flame freeze. directly at us. So again, when I said fire will move faster than you can run, there was no running. How soon between when you noticed the wind shift until you realized you were in danger?

Less than a minute. Fuck. Yeah. And how far away were the flames before that wind shift? About 100 meters. Okay. So you were close to them, but they weren't, you didn't feel like you were at risk in the current conditions. Far enough away that we're kind of watching it going, we're good. I think we're good. And the fuel type was against in Orrne Desert. This is dried brush, grass, Palo Verdi trees, mesquite trees. And the height of those trees is up to like maybe 20 feet tall.

So wind shifts. It's blowing straight at us. There's no escape. So I hit the deck. I didn't have time to pull up my fire shelter. Here's the funny thing about a fire shelter. Everybody all over the country trains in the apparatus bay at their fire station with a training fire shelter, which actually isn't the mylar because that shit falls apart once it's folded 200 times. In perfect conditions, when you're in a wildland fire situation where a shit is kind of hitting the fan, you're dealing with uneven terrain and howling when. wind a lot of the time because that's what drives these fires. So try to deploy a Mylar fire shelter in 20, 30, 30 mile an hour wind.

Yeah. It's like waving a flag behind you and then trying to get into it. It's crazy. So you straight just hit the deck. Hit the deck. I'm assuming you have turnouts on or something that's flame return? Wildland gear is much lighter than structure fire gear. Structure fire gear is meant to protect.

you up to several hundred degrees. You also have breathing apparatus to protect your lungs. And it's a lot heavier. You can't wear that stuff and function for more than 20 minutes in a wildland situation, which takes, in some cases, days, your working shifts. So it's a lot lighter. It's no-mex. It's lightweight.

It's fire-resistant. Fire-retardant. It's not fire-proof. and it doesn't cover everything. So as I'm laying there on the dirt, just getting pounded by smoke, like choking smoke to the point where I was thinking, this is about to go pretty bad.

There's a gap between the end of my long-sleeve Nomex shirt and my work gloves, and that skin is getting burned. And I'm trying to cover the back of my neck. That's what I suppose to those things. The nice thing about fire in the Sonoran Desert is it travels very fast and it burns the fuel pretty quickly. So once the flame front goes through, things cool down, there's less smoke. We made it. It just burned right over the top of you guys.

Burned over the top of us. Jesus. The crazy thing was that this neighborhood had cleared enough brush and shit out from around their houses. no structures lost. So in a way we kind of got lucky. Yeah. In a lot of ways. So that was my first, that was one of my first close calls kind of in my life, really,

where I looked back on it, not so much right at the time. I mean, there's this crazy adrenaline rush. Like, holy shit, that just happened. Is everybody okay? I can't believe, where were you? Like, what had, like, you know, you're kind of comparing notes. And then command heard kind of what had happened. And they call us back to the command post.

And they do a medical e-val real quick. And a buddy of mine, a paramedic is checking my vitals. And they're completely out of whack. My heart rates through the roof, my blood pressure too. Shocker. And he kind of looks at me and he's like, dude. and I remember looking at him and go, Jason, I'm not going home. So we're good, right?

Yeah, get some water. Took a break, went back out on the fireline. So that was a breakdown of leadership. That was a breakdown of multiple principles that have been in place in wildland firefighting for a long time. and they're there because people have died. What should you guys have done differently? First, we should have had a lookout, but we didn't have enough people to do it because that lookout could have realized, hey, there's a wind shift.

Usually when there's a wind shift and you're working, it takes a minute before you kind of go, hey, the wind's blowing a different direction. Well, which way is it blowing out? And, you know, having somebody just watching that, like a lifeguard. Yeah. There have been a lot of wildland incidents where there was either no lookout or an inadequate lookout assigned. And when I mentioned having your most experienced firefighter as a lookout, having a lookout, having somebody be a lookout is one thing. Having them know what they're looking at is another.

Yeah. And, you know, that's acknowledged now, but not without the cost of some lives. Yeah. So, yeah, look out positioning the truck for an easy escape. It would have been another better communication within the crew. There's at least half a dozen things that fell apart. Yeah. And those things fall apart when there's a tragedy.

whether it's wildland or structure. Unfortunately, with structure firefighting, a lot of the times, the times I've been hurt were kind of a result of what was going on outside of the building versus what we were doing inside. And I say that because you...

Excuse me. There are building conditions and fire conditions that someone outside can see that we can't see inside. Take an attic fire, for instance. You can pull up in a fire truck out in front of an attic fire, house with an attic fire going on. There's smoke and flames pumping out of the eaves, maybe coming through the roof a little bit, and you walk in the front door and it's crystal clear because the fire's in the attic. that's an example of being able to be inside a structure and have no idea what the hell is going on.

Yeah. Yeah, I've been injured a few times in fires. Had my feet crushed in an aerial ladder. Had a roof collapse. Came down on my head, hurt my head and neck. You know, multiple sprains and strains and stuff like that. some minor burns here and there, nothing to leave a hideous scar. But it's kind of, when I started, it was still accepted as part of the job.

Like, yeah, you might get kind of fucked up. Now that's not acceptable, which is good. I mean, that's the way it should be. Unfortunately, I think for small departments, And in a lot of cases, those volunteer departments out in the middle of nowhere that you see flying overhead, they don't have the resources. So, yeah, you're it. You're alone on the fire truck that you drove from your house or your job to go pick up and then drive to somebody's house that's on fire. And you put it out by yourself somehow.

Hard pass. The thing about Scottsdale and the Valley and, you know, most municipal areas now is that we have a freaking huge amount of resources. So, yeah, initially there might be four people at a house fire. But the cavalry's coming. Yeah. Those four people are only alone for about four to eight minutes in most cases. and then the manpower just piles on. Yeah.

So how was it once you finally get fired on, or fired on, hired on full time? Was the job what you thought it would be? It was more. Something else that I saw as a firefighter. Later I went to paramedic school, but I also did technical rescue or TRT. and what TRT is is all the stuff that a normal fire truck will pull up to and go,

I don't know what the fuck to do here. That is a trench collapse, a confined space rescue, a worker up on a power line tower that's stuck, palm tree rescue in the valley where we live, swift water rescue, so when there's a flood, that. and our kind of our bread and butter was a mountain rescue so anything on trail anything high angle rock climbers

mountain bikers hikers okay all that I climbed rock that's one of the things we have in common I think you and I have rock climbing motor cycling and archery indeed in common

yeah I started climbing rock in 80s In 1987 when we moved to the valley, my mom took me to a local park, and I started climbing on rocks and met a neighbor who was a rock climber. And before you knew it, I was on rope and leading climbs. I got introduced to it while I was in the military, and I loved it. I was a lead climber for quite some time until I got some nerve damage in my old left ankle and really can't tolerate my entire body weight. on a dime size edge. So that was the end of my rock climbing days, but it was fun.

Oh, yeah. I loved placing your own pro, lead climbing. It was, I don't know, people think because I skydive and it used to base jump that I'm not scared of heights. I'm fucking terrified of heights. An airplane, it's like you're looking at an abstract painting. Like, oh. It doesn't make sense.

You have no frame or reference. Yeah, and base jumping, the stuff that I was doing, I mean, the Parian Bridge in Idaho is 486 feet from the rail to the ground. That one is an emotionally intense experience. But what trips me out is about 30 feet off the ground to about 200. Beyond that, I'm like, oh, I'm definitely going to die, so I'm not going to worry about it. But those intermediate ranges scramble my eggs. Oh, yeah.

I took a 12-foot fall at one point on lead, but I hadn't placed any gear yet. Landed in a seated position on Boulder. Oh, you're lucky you're walking. that's what the neurologist said after I broke L3 and L4 broke my spine yeah and that was in Scottsdale and the crew from my station on the other shift yeah they rescued me I'm sure you lived that down though throughout the course of your career I was fucked up enough that they they were very concerned they there was absolutely no shit get by them. See, that's how you know that it's actually serious. You want your buddies to show up to

help you and they're making fun of you when they're like, hey man, it's going to be okay. You're like, oh, how bad is it? Yeah. For that one, I've been banged up a lot. For that one, they want to push enough morphine that I was, that I was laboring to breathe and I actually asked them to ventilate me with a bag valve mask. I'm just telling them bag me. And then they flew me under a helicopter to a short haul. It's a 70 to 90 foot rope that's dangling under a helicopter with a Stokes basket. It's like a wire. Yep.

Rescue, Google it, whatever. They flew me in that down to a cul-de-sac or an LZ, then transported me over to another LZ where a medical helicopter was waiting. They flew me to the trauma center. So I've done that kind of work a lot, like more. more than I remember, a lot of helicopter work. Yeah. But I've also been a patient. And that made me a better rescuer.

When I was a reserve, I started going to team drills because I was involved in rock climbing. Somebody said, hey, go to the technical rescue drills. So they do all that shit. Yeah. All right. So I'd been going to those for a while. I graduated first to my academy, and they sent me to the TRT station.

day one as a probationary firefighter. That's a position that usually doesn't get seen until a guy has, you know, 10 years on. But I got it day one, which was fucking great. It was cool. Was it well accepted by your peers? It was, I think, because I... Like, this is uncomfortable for me

because I don't like to... my own horn, but I performed. You had the technical prowess? Yeah, and I didn't flaunt. I wasn't a dick. I just, I did my job. I put my head down, and, you know, when there was training, I trained, and when there were calls, I performed. Yeah. At that point, I was an EMT, though.

Fire department engines and ladder trucks are staffed in Scottsdale and the entire valley in Phoenix, Arizona, with a minimum of two paramedics, and then the other guys are EMTs. and I'm using guys as guys and gals at this point, at this point. But the other two guys are EMTs. When I started and we're doing these technical rescues, the paramedics are getting sent in to do all the cool shit. They're going into the confined space. They're going into the trench collapse.

They're flying in the helicopter. And while I kind of perform a support role as an EMT. So I decide, okay, it's time to be a medic because I want to do more. So I go to medic school. And I had to spend some time away from TRT because they put you at a different station and you get call volume and experience as a medic. But as soon as I could, I transferred back into TRT. So I retired after 27 years in the department.

And I did TRT for probably 24, 25. compared to the 10 or so that most, you know, senior TRT guys got, got like over twice as much experience. Does that also give you over twice as months exposure to those type of injuries and the things that can come from that as well? Definitely. Yeah. Definitely.

Back to the educational thing, I believe in teaching everything that you know. And I really believed it because my dad didn't teach me the things that I felt I should know. So that was kind of driving me. So when I start getting this TRT experience and I have some years on and there was a chance to teach in the regional system for multiple fire departments, I jumped on it. So I start teaching these TRT disciplines. They're all rope rescue is based. They're all based on rope rescue. Rope is involved in all the technical rescue disciplines.

But I'm teaching all of them after a few years. And I did that because I got tired of going to the same drill site year after year and doing the exact same scenario. Boring, not engaging. So I start coming up with these different ideas and I present them to the powers. And they say, yeah, yeah, that's all. Sounds like a good idea. By the way, do you want to teach Swiftwater Rescue next month?

Yeah, sure. I got ideas for that too. So people liked coming to the drills. And a lot of the times I would base these drills on actual calls that I had run. So there was realism. I would sometimes I'd bring in actors. It was fun. Yeah.

But it engaged people. And they would always get back in their trucks at the end of the drill and go, Dude, good job. That was cool. We actually learned something. And then that was a win that motivated me to do more. So I was involved with that training for probably 15 years. And I had some street crud.

But yeah, there were a lot of traumatic things in technical rescue that I was exposed to. of calls, a lot of really fucked up things. A plane crash with burnt up father and son. A water rescue with a Boy Scout troop that drowned. Yeah, that kind of stuff. And I never dealt with it in a healthy way. How did you deal with it? At first, I dealt with it.

I can tell you how firefighters deal with immediately. A lot of the time it's with it's with humor in the truck driving home. Gallo's humor. Serious gallows humor. Alcohol played a factor. I'm not familiar

with that at all. Right. Or the gallows humor. Right. And when I got when I got hired with the fire apartment, I was 20. So yeah, I don't

I don't think I I knew how to, I didn't know how to deal with it. Were you think you were using bike riding as a physical outlet as well? Well, this is where some of the signs and symptoms of PTSD started to present themselves. But I've always used activity, sports, time in the outdoors as a form of therapy. And to great effect, really. I think it is therapeutic. until it's not.

And this is the crazy, there's this dichotomy that goes on. 20 hours a week on a road bike and a mountain bike is a great way to isolate yourself socially. That's a PTSD sign, symptom, social isolation. But it also makes you really fast. And when you're really fast, you win. So it looks like on the surface,

I'm killing it. I'm spending all this time training and here's the reward and all those sacrifices socially in relationships, all that stuff. They seem to pay off. But what you're really doing is just putting

a band-aid on an amputation. It's like just, it's not going to, it's not going to work. So yeah, those things, it wasn't until later in my career that I really started to exhibit some of the other signs like hypervigilance. I have a pretty elevated startle reaction. You know, just of the, let's say, 9 to 13 different signs and symptoms of PTSD, by the time I went through my 27 years, I could check about 11 of those.

Do you remember when they started, how early on? I remember having feelings that were unhealthy as a kid. And those were suicidal ideations. Whether that was part of upbringing and conditions and that stuff or just being a kid, But whatever it was, I remember having suicidal ideations at a very young age. And then throughout my fire career, that concept actually became a source of comfort. The concept of suicide? Yes.

Because I always thought I could just end it. if this doesn't work out or that doesn't work out or if I can't take this anymore yeah I can always call it a day or call it a life and I think that you know I had some ideas of how that would go or what would happen but I never really acted those out until I raced motorcycles at a basically like almost a professional level. I had my AMA Pro license and I also taught motorcycle racing with a new racers clinic for my sanctioning body. I did that for about six years until in 2009 I had a really bad day. I crashed, I actually crashed three times on a Sunday.

So quick side note, I race a 2009, Yamaha R6, 600cc sport bike. I raced it against three different middleweight classes against other 600s with different modifications for those classes. I raced it against 750cc bikes and then I raced it against three different 1,000 Cc categories. And I would win them all.

I actually went undefeated from January on in 2009. until May, I got a bad start in a race. I was running second behind a buddy of mine. And I had made a passing plan. I knew where he had a weakness that I could exploit. I set up a pass. And I'm making a run, like a really fast run at him going into a corner, and he fell right in front of me.

I had nowhere to go, and I ran over him. I broke his pelvis. I slammed my head into the ground and we're doing about a hundred slam my head into the ground hard enough to to damage my helmet down to the core ground through the leathers on my knee completely and then ground my knee down to the bone and got up and went back into the paddock and my crew put the bike back together. I put my spare leathers on and

a spare helmet and I went back out and did the next race. I had a mechanical issue where the throttle tube actually rotated on the handlebar that the crew had replaced in that following

race and it obstructed the travel of the front brake lever. So consequently, halfway through the race after I had been twisting that throttle wide open, the whole thing rotated and I was not able to get full break pressure on the front brake. So it slowed me enough that when I ran off into a gravel trap, I took a glancing blow at a tire barrier, but wound up hitting my head again, damaged my helmet again. and a buddy of mine had a spare helmet. We go back into the paddock, we put the bike back together a second time, and I go out again. Because at this point,

I'm not only leading seven class championships, I'm leading the overall championship. I have my AMIC pro license, and I'm looking at taking a leave of absence from the fire department to go motorcycle road racing for a year. I was going to go to Laguna Saka the following Tuesday to do a track day. This was happening. I was going to go be a pro motorcycle racer.

We put the bike back together. I get a poor start in this next race that I do. I'm running forth. Does that just mean you're slow off the line? Yes. Yeah. And I was on pole. But my head isn't there.

mind you, I got two traumatic brain injuries at this point. I was going to say you just cracked your noodle twice. You're on your third helmet of the day. Yeah. Not brilliant. I get a poor start. Three of my buddies are in front of me. And I settle in for about three or four laps,

twist the throttle as hard as I can, make sure the thing isn't going to malfunction again. Breaks are good. All right. I'm going to make a run. Let's do this. go win this race. So they're running pretty much nose to tail, these three guys.

And they come through that turn where I had crashed and run over my buddy. We're doing about 100. And we're coming into the slowest corner of the track. And that corner is taken at about 30 to 40 miles an hour. I'm going to pass at least the last guy, if not, like make a hero move and take all three of them. dive into the corner and ride off into the sunset. Again, I make a good run at them. I go for the front brake and it comes all the way to the bar.

I have no front brake pressure. And in a split second, I decided not to bowl over all three of my friends in front of me and I swerve to the left and I'm headed at the tire barrier that I had brushed against in that prior race. I'm all over the rear brake. It's not stopping the bike because that's not what's. they do. Yeah. And I hit that tire barrier head on at about 90 miles an hour. Oh, fuck. There's a 10-foot chain link fence that runs around the outside of the track. There's about a four or five-foot tall tire barrier right in front of it. I hit the tire barrier and my bike

and I fly completely up over the fence out of the track property, like or out of the race truck. tore the front end of the bike off. I broke my left ankle, my left femur, and two vertebrae in my neck. I'm at home recovering from that, and now go back to the break in my back rock climbing. They discharged me with morphine in pill form.

Talked about it in a prior episode recently. And I'm hooked on it, right? But I want to go back. to work so I wean myself off of it and I go back after breaking my back they discharged me with Oxycontin with all these you know neck and leg and ankle injuries and they said that I was going to be out for at least six months about three months pass and I'm actually doing well enough that I can I'm about to get cleared to go back to work but I'm hooked

on Oxycontin. So it's a Friday morning, I decide I'm not taking it this morning. I made it a few hours until about noon. How was Friday afternoon for you?

At about noon, I had like a shiver. What the f? I walk over the thermostat on the wall and the temperature in the house is like 76 or something. What the hell? About 10 minutes later, I'm sweating bullets. Again, go to the thermostat, 76.

Oh, I'm having narcotic withdrawals right now. I think I made it an hour, but I was crawling to and from the thermostat to keep checking the temperature every time this change happened. And then I finally had to take an oxy. But I made kind of a schedule, and I weaned myself off of oxycontin with percassette, and then I weaned myself off a percassette with Vicodin at steadily decreasing doses, and I fucking beat it. How long did that take you? About a week.

Fuck, so you just titrated yourself off? Yeah. The week before I had gone to my pain control specialist and said, hey, I'm about ready to go back to work. How do I get off of these meds? And she said, well, we can steadily decrease your dose. And over the next two months, I think you can do that. I'm like, can I just stop? And she actually laughed and said, well, I can think of a more humane way to do it.

I thought, well, we'll fucking see. So Friday morning, I try it and I realize, okay. By the following Friday, I'm down to a pretty low dose of Vicodin. But between Oxy and Vicodin time in that week, I went downstairs in my house. And I loaded up my 357 and I put it in my mouth because I didn't think I was going to be able to continue. I just, I didn't know if I was going to be able to go back to work. I didn't know what it was going to be like when I went back to work.

And I had also started crashing my motorcycle every single night just as I fell asleep. In your dreams? Yep. I was having flashbacks. Was it the uncertainty that led you to loading up that? 357? Was it the or was it? Well, there, there was uncertainty and there was certainty. The uncertainty was what's going to happen to me.

And the certainty was, I'm pretty fucked up right now. I am hurting worse than I ever have in my life in more different places with more different injuries than I ever have in my life. I feel like I'm fucked. So I find myself sitting there in the basement. tasting metal, and I look across the room and my mountain bike is hanging on the wall. And I looked at that thing and I thought, I want to get back on that. I really want to go riding.

And I hadn't in months. And I set the gun down. I needed something to hope for. Did you tell anybody about that incident? Nope. Did you reach out to help or for help from any of your friends or coworkers? No. Okay.

The resources were there. In fact, after I had those flashbacks for probably a good week or two, I went through the EAP program, the employee assistance program through the city. And I went to a psychologist, a counselor. And the first thing she said was, I don't prescribe medicine. I just do counseling. And I'm like, yeah, fired up. I need help getting through this thing.

So over the course of a couple months, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it, and the flashbacks stop or at least greatly decrease, right? So I think everything's cool and I go back to work. And it feels freaking great to get back to work. Got a purpose again? Yes. But I keep running traumatic calls. everybody had every firefighter has and I'm I'm I can't talk about law enforcement or military because I don't know what it's like to carry a gun for work I know what it's like to carry a gun but not to get paid but I I know damn well what it's like to be a firefighter paramedic rescue tech I worked on a busy city for the hell of it I did look at how many calls or estimated how many calls I'd run over the course of my career it's about 19,000 And then I narrowed that down to how many TRT calls I'd run.

And that's hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. People with kids have a hard time running pediatric calls. You get a pediatric drowning. That's a shit show anyway. But if you have a pediatric drowning and you happen to have a 16-month-old at home also, but you're looking at this one that's limp and lifeless. It's as close to home as it can hit. That's a trigger.

Yeah, big time. From some of my trigger calls were patients with Alzheimer's disease because my mom, my adoptive mom died of Alzheimer's. Narcotic overdoses because I knew damn well what that was like to have a bottle full of pills. A couple of things that I excelled at were anything cardiac related, cardiac arrest. I freaking jammed trauma that was good and I ran both of those in technical rescue situations

so that was like gravy I loved doing those things but they were traumatic the technical rescue call that hit me the hardest was a confined space rescue during monsoon season in Phoenix,

so it was well over 100 degrees, probably over 110. A crew of workers showed up to replace a water pump that was 25 feet below grade underground in a sewer system grease trap. And this is essentially a vertical tube, vertical concrete tube

that's about 36 inches diameter inside and it has a pump submersible pump in the bottom and when it fills this pump automatically pumps the water up it had failed because during monsoon season we had a bunch of flooding

and it's just overwhelmed the things were running consolate so this crew shows up it's a crew of three they lower their own submersible pump into the space and pump out the water and sewage. And there's an extension ladder in there. So they climb down the extension ladder. The first worker goes down there and is overcome by sewer gas, hydrogen sulfide, and is unable to climb back up the ladder, which by the way has been lubricated

with grease and shit and everything that's in a sewer. So he's slipping and sliding and can't it up the ladder. Second worker goes in after him to help him out. He's overcome by hydrogen sulfide. Third worker goes in, starts feeling like he's about to pass out, climbs out real quick, calls 911. That's how we got the story of how the first two perish. We show up first, and my captain ran over to the entry hatch and signal to me. He holds up two fingers, then points one finger down, and then does it twirley with his hand. So two workers, down in the space, rescue operation. And I'm standing over by the support truck, which has all the confined space rescue and all our tools and rope and all that stuff in it.

So we start setting up for this. Firefighter that goes into a fire has heavy turnout gear on and an SCBA airpack on their back, and they're self-contained. That's what SCBA stands for, self-contained breathing apparatus. For a confined space, we're kind of wearing our brush gear in a way. We're wearing a Nomex flight suit.

I'm very familiar with those. They suck in the summer. They're enforced. Yeah, I got stories. Yeah. And a supplied air, or a, yeah, a sob a supplied air breathing.

apparatus instead of self-contained. So the tanks are on a cart. Yeah, the hose going down. With 300 feet of hose. And you've got a tiny escape bottle on your harness that if the hose or the if the air supply fails, you're on this backup thing. And two forms of light and all your rope rigging stuff, class three harness. So a confined space is involved from an equipment standpoint. But Now we're tagging on hazmat. So, TRT, Technical Rescue, is a special operations function of the fire department, spec ops. So is hazmat.

I'm not hazmat trained, but I'm TRT trained. I can wear a hazmat suit, and I can go to work in it. That's fine, and I don't need to monitor or sample. I don't really need to perform a hazmat function. I just need to be protected, from the hazmat while I work. And at that point, at that point I've got, sorry.

No worries. Probably 20 years of TRT experience. So multiple fire departments from the area, multiple TRT teams have responded to this. And I'm the most experienced guy of anybody. So I'm gonna get sent down into this thing. The thing is while we were setting up our equipment, that space filled back up with water and sewage from the strip mall that we were in.

So these guys are dead down there? If the hydrogen sulfide didn't get them, the water did. So my captain gets my attention and gives me the fingers across the throat. And my crew and I switch over and recovery mode. You guys have way different hand signals. Yeah, for you, that probably means kill a guy. This is the fingers across. This is danger crossing. But it'd be like two people they have a dick and they're spinning it around like a helicopter. That's if somebody did that, it'd be like, oh, awesome. But this one's danger crossing. That means you're getting ready to come up to

something. We got to send out an advance unit, usually a road. Yeah. Here's the thing about those communications. No, that's official. They're probably doing that just so that you're not podcasting how bad the situation is. Well, my communications with my captain were not official. He and I had at that point worked together for probably 16 years, 17 years. So we could communicate nonverbally. Yeah. Worked really well.

And we were a formidable team. We had a shitload of experience on our crew. At one point, I worked on a crew that had 90 years of cumulative experience. That's awesome. Yeah. So if anybody could have saved these guys, it would have been us because we've got the tools, we've got the talent, all this. We call it off. We switch into recovery mode so we're not rescuing salvageable victims.

We're recovering bodies. So a couple hours later, after they have monitored the space and decide that the hydrogen sulfide is actually off the scale and we think hydrogen cyanide might be involved at this point. Plus, I think three things that they couldn't identify. This was like, this was dangerous, right? They lowered me underneath a tripod that was set up over this manhole cover. But the manhole cover hatch was only about 18 inches. So, smaller and diameter than the actual tube. Yeah.

So there's diamond plate that's welded onto this thing, and it's just this small little square door. So I got to wiggle myself down through this thing and they're lowering me on a winch cable on the on the tripod. And then I've got an additional rope system that I can't that I recommended. And at this point, there's a team of people that are that are making plans. Okay, we're going to use this equipment. We're going to do it this way. At one point they asked me, okay, so how are you going to attach? the rope system to the victim.

And I remember saying, like, wait, what? Yeah, like, what knots are you going to use? Or, you know, what equipment? And I said, I'm going to bring, like, three different things. Don't worry about it. Like, that's the least of my concerns with this. Oh, yeah, okay. All right, no problem.

I use the German go fuck yourself knot. It was the go-fucking see knot. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, what? Get the fuck out of my hair. Right. So they lower me in the,

to this thing and there's water still they had we had taken over this strip mall and shut down all the plumbing and everything but there's still some residual water coming out of one of these pipes and the workers are entangled at the bottom of this space the bottom guy is facing up the top guy's facing down I can still see the the bottom guy's face and his eyes are wide open and so is his mouth like he's gasping like he did the last time and there's water that's pouring out of one of these pipes and it's going directly in his mouth

that's my nice little mental snapshot that I get to remember but I I thought quick and I on the radio I called for a stop and they stopped lower in me and are you code four are you okay Yeah, hey, throw one of our fuzzy medical blankets down. Okay, stand by.

Two minutes later, I look up and there's this blue blanket floating down in the little tunnel of light from my headlamp. I catch it and I wot it up and I shove it in that pipe. I go, okay, resume lowering. Because I had to get that situation to stop. I get down to the bottom Again the ladder is too slippery to even stand on or anything And before I can call for another stop I realize I'm actually going to have to stand on these guys

Because there's no There's no room down there to work So I'm standing on bodies I have to reach all the way around The top victim to make my attachment With the gear that I brought down there And and they raised me back out

and then they hoist that first victim out and then they were going to do that complete evolution one more time one of my partners was going to do it I get out of the space and they're decontaminating me and I just about pass out during the decon process and I'm still I still have my face piece on I'm still breathing supplied air during the decon

and I and I but my feet feel squishy and I realize that I must have broken the hazmat suit because I was standing in product down there about knee high and I thought that I had been exposed to some mysterious shit down there and now I was having a reaction to it. So they get me out of the suit. I'm all decontaminated. They take my vitals and again another time they're, you know, my vitals. are completely out of whack.

So they started an IV on me, and we realized that my boots were actually full of sweat, and it felt like it was almost about mid-calf. So I was having a heat emergency. I get transported to the ER. They draw blood, and they're testing for hazmat exposure. I'm good. But that messed me up.

Yeah, it would be hard for it not to. Yeah. Yeah, that call, there's something called a career call on the fire service because it happens once in a career. It's basically you're, ask anybody that's been on for 20 years. Hey, what was the biggest call? Oh, man, we had this, we had a fire and it was on the third floor of this apartment complex and we pulled a family of six out. It's like significant stuff, right? So that was a career call.

but over the course of my career with the things that I did, I had about a dozen career calls. Were you seeing a counselor by any chance throughout this stretch? Were you doing anything from a professional between the ears to release the pressure valve? I went back to the same counselor that I had gone to for the motorcycle thing. And I went back to her after we had a stack at like three really shitty calls. But the third thing that happened was one of our fire captains hadn't shown up for work for a few days. And my captain was best friends with him, lifelong friends, and he wasn't answering the phone for him.

So one night after dinner, and my captain was off all day. He did not look right. Something was on his mind. And he told us, hey, saddle up. something's wrong with Eddie. We got to go check on him. So we drive to our fire captain's friend's house, and we at all, I had known Eddie for as long as I'd been in the fire department.

So and he was kind of a he was a little bit of a father figure to me and to a lot of people in the department. His thing was a vehicular extrication. He could teach it like a motherfucker. I learned a lot of stuff. from Eddie. We made entry into his house and found him dead in his recliner in his living room.

Turned out he had a pulmonary embolism, which is a, it's like a heart attack, but it's in your lung. You wind up with a blocked blood vessel and you die. And we were the first ones there. So that was the cherry on top of this run of some bad calls. So I had gone back. And I had always been a big proponent of mental health care, especially after the motorcycle thing, because I thought, I think that squared me away. Let's, you know, enforce, you know, reinforce this idea. So I remember telling my career, hey, boy, I'm going in for tune up this rotation off because this is a shit show. They were like, yeah, I don't know. I think I'm okay.

I'll be all right. And so, yeah, I went back for that. And again, thought I was putting a band-aid on a big wound again. How honest were you with the counselor? I was really honest about the motorcycle situation and all of the things surrounding that. I was really honest with the three things that I, you know, that I went back to that time. But I was not honest about how I was coping. In fact, I think I probably straight up lied about alcohol.

Are you, you know, are you using alcohol? No, no, I'm good. Come on. Well, that's the thing. Counseling isn't, it's not magic. You know, it's not a wand that you go in one. time and you come out a completely new person. Right.

It requires an incredible amount of work and openness and honesty with the person seeking out the help. The counselor can't actually solve shit. No, they're not a freaking mind reader. No, but they can lay a foundation from which you can hopefully build yourself back stronger or whatever metaphor or analogy that you would want to use. But if you, and the reason I asked that question is, trust me, I've had more than enough time talking with a counselor that it's easier.

to avoid certain topics. Oh, yeah. Or lie by omission would be another way to say, not necessarily tell the whole truth. And then you come out of that and you're not necessarily any better off. But from an outside perspective, you're putting in the work.

You're going to see a counselor. Annie, I got a question for you. Do you think that anyone who has not done the job that you used to do can understand your thoughts, feelings, emotions about the job that you used to do? Yes. It's not that complicated.

Really? Yeah. I'm amazed. I don't think they have any understanding about what it feels like to be in that moment. I don't think they would have an understanding of what it feels like to see almost daily your children and then the children that you've been in situations that you had to kill that bracket their ages. and that you can't avoid seeing that.

I don't think they can understand the weight that it would have on somebody, but I think they can understand why, especially if you were to explain to them the situation that you were in. So I think they can understand at a broad level, but that's different than having to live with it and carry the weight, if that makes sense. So from a treatment standpoint, from a professional evaluation and counseling standpoint.

Yeah, I agree. They can conceptualize trauma and how it affects people and that. And I think counselors, though, and so I think I know where you're going with this, talking to somebody like the world that I came from, the counselors that I talked to never did my job. I didn't want them to be an expert in doing my job. I wanted them to be an expert in understanding how my brain worked.

I wanted them to be an expert, not my brain, but like brains. I wanted them to be an expert in being able to give me multiple approaches to reduce the volume and the cup that I have when it came to stress or give me a different way of looking at something that would allow me to process it. So I didn't need them to be an expert at the trauma that I experienced. I needed them to be an expert at the function of the brain. What I will say is the people who did have a similar background, they were able to get there faster because of the shared experience in vernacular more than anything. They could make

comparisons and you know and they could line things up and juxtapose things that made sense instantly, but I still have been able to get there with people who don't come from that world. It just took a little bit more time. Yeah. Yeah, because you don't have to explain what a, what a magazine is or, correct, or tactics that you talk about. Or I could talk in terminology that is super comfortable to me that they would understand. Whereas a professional who is not as familiar with the technical terms, you're spending time explaining, you're like, fuck, I need to tell you about this, but first I have to explain to you what this is and what that is and what this is. Exactly. But I did think it is possible. And I think that's, I don't want to call it an excuse,

but I think that's what it is. A lot of people will say, well, I'm not going to talk to somebody who doesn't have these experiences. It's like, fuck you, man, that's an excuse. It can be done. Does it take longer? Is it going to be more difficult? Maybe. But the end state can be the same in my experience. So in my truck, I was the fuck you guy who said, bullshit, go through the EAP, get a provider, and go do it. Firefighters have trust issues, big time. Why? Yeah. What do you think is the worst thing that you can do to a firefighter? Um, force him to drive a cop car. That actually falls under this. Tell them that they can't be a firefighter anymore.

Tell them that they can't get on that truck and run calls anymore. Tell them that they can't have this as their identity and their life and their passion and what they may have been dreaming about doing since they were 10 years old. Same issues with my previous career, law enforcement, for sure. Yeah. So guys will push through and fight being taken off the truck and put on light duty while they work on an issue. Yeah. I think in most firefighters' hearts, they know that if they go in and sit down with somebody and tell them exactly what they're thinking and feeling and what they've seen, that person is going to say, you are not fit for duty right now.

So there's an honesty with your therapist issue there. However, what I'll say is... There's a way around that, though, and that's you go outside of the EAP, and you find a counselor. that's completely outside of any reporting mechanism to your chain of command, which comes with complications. Monetarily. Yes. Think back to those vast swaths of open land.

How many therapists you think are available in the middle of nowhere, Kansas? Well, in the modern era, get on the goddamn Internet and do it remotely. That's possible, but there are providers that won't prescribe medicine without an in-person and visit. And that kind of, we'll talk about that in a second, but there's, there's a psychiatrist and there's a psychologist. The psychologist, and a lot of people don't know the difference between the two. A psychologist is a counselor. And that is, that's been one of my greatest resources, is my, my therapist. Yeah. But I have a team, it takes a team. I have a psychiatrist also. And I am on, I'm on a light med regiment and we'll circle back around and I'll tell you why.

But it takes multiple things to really get this situation under control in a lot of cases. So yeah, like I said, I was the proponent of getting mental health care and I thought I was good, but I was only using one tool at the time. So I had gotten into, I race bicycles for 30 years. At some point late in that, it wasn't fun anymore. That's a sign of depression when things that were once dear to you are no longer interesting. Yeah. Okay, great. When you're in it, you can't, I couldn't see it or recognize it.

And I just, I wasn't aware of it. I think that getting away from cycling created like a vacuum, like, a vacuum. a passion vacuum and that got filled with Olympic recurve target archery. As fate would have it, I picked up my bow at the shop and there was an older gentleman at the range that day and he was waiting for a client. I didn't know who he was. I went back into the shop side and they said, hey, did you see that older guy over there? Yeah, over in the range? Yeah, that was. Yeah, that was dick tone okay I don't they're telling me you should Google them okay so I get home look him up he's an absolute legendary world-class archery coach he coached

J-bar's to 1988 eight gold medal Olympic victory he's coached multiple archers including Casey Coughfold to national titles. And a month after I saw him for the first time, he responded to the email that I sent him and said, come on down, I'll work with you. I wind up shooting at a national level, about mid-field national level within eight or nine months. Probably I'm going to guess because you were psychotic about your practice.

Well, when you have 20 hours a week that you used to spend on cycling and a very intimate knowledge of training cycles, periodization, and how to set up a schedule, it was going to happen. So you're a fan of deep dives, not just toes in the pool. Cannonball. You and I have much more in common than you may think. I struggle with doing anything half-ass, which is why I avoid new hot. hobbies. I got a buddy. You guys need to go to snowmobile. You need to do this. I'm like, dude, I really like the things that I do. And I can't just like snowmobile one time. I'm going to need to research all the equipment. What's the most technical, difficult ride that I can do?

Because I'm going to do that Thursday, even though there's no snow on the ground. Yeah. And so, but I recognize that in myself. So I'm just like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, heismitting these other opportunities. Well, I recognize that. that now. Yeah. And again, you know, spending that much time at an outdoor archery range shooting 70 meters by yourself in the summer in Arizona, that's not normal. It isn't normal, but it's also explainable, especially if you are having the results that

you were having. There's, you know what I mean? A lot of this stuff can hide in plain sight. It makes sense in hindsight, for sure. But at the time, it's feeling good to me because I'm, I'm. increasing in skill. My scores are coming up. But in the back of my mind,

I'm being isolated for that much time and I'm not around people in it. And that makes it feel good. Hadn't been racing for a while. I had my TRT assignment revoked for me because I was accused of bullying someone. And it was somebody that I had actually mentored for

a couple of years. It's rough. And did not bully, by the way. So, yeah, I had that taken away from me. And that was, I used to call myself a firefighter in disguise because my hair was not this short. When I retired, my hair was down in my shoulders. I never wore a shirt or anything that said, I'm a firefighter on it. I didn't have stickers on my truck.

But the truck was red, right? No. Damn it. No. Can't speed in a red truck. That's true. Yeah. But most of them are either you're a firefighter or a Marine.

I mean. Total firefighter in disguise. Yeah. You didn't have like crossed axes on the like a massive 18 foot sticker on the back window. And like a gold chain. No. But make no mistake. It was who I was.

Yeah. And at that point, I had done that. way over half my life. It was what I knew. Technical rescue got taken away from me. That was a big portion of what I knew and who I was. I lose that identity. I lose that sense of purpose.

I continued to precept paramedic students and train people, but it just wasn't the same. Yeah. No more helicopter work. Getting lowered on a winch cable to do a rescue and make decisions and evacuate a person. That's probably a good thing. Helicopters are really dangerous. You know what?

They have the flight characteristic of a rock when the engine goes bad. Yeah, of all the dangerous shit that firefighters do, being around a helicopter was the most dangerous thing that I ever did. And I was acutely aware of that. And I had trained over the years, I trained with three different agencies on different airframes and with different policies and procedures. I was dialed. But I still like, okay. At least in an airplane, if shit goes bad, you're like, fucking glide. Freeway over there, helicopter, when it starts going weir, we're and all the lights are flashing, like, should I jump?

Do I have a better chance of survival if I leave this aircraft? Yeah, and when they say, we can auto rotate and it'll be a hard landing. Here's the deal, they can. How hard. But if they miss time it, it's not going to be awesome. And when they're hovering it at 70 feet, working with me on the hoist cable, I'm going to lose. Like they're, yeah, anyway.

Yeah, total side note. Fortunately. Stay away from helicopters, everybody. Yeah. Lesson for the day. Helicopter bad. So I have these things that are piling up. You mentioned a cup.

That's how I describe stress. And because it's interesting. And I've had this experience. You know, you go into a room, let's say, with six people, which is far more than we ever would. This is more of like an analogy, but six people like go into a room room. Yeah. Or you're on a target.

But six people experience exactly the same thing. Not only do they describe it differently, but I would say that there are six cups, one for each of them. And one might be a shot glass and one might be a 64 ounce redneck guzzler. And for the guy who only has a shot glass and you know, the volume of the cup is the stress you can tolerate, that incident might be an eyedropper. And the redneck guzzler might have four gallons of water. poured into that thing and it spills over it. And it's, everybody tolerates it differently.

And I think you can, you can work on tools that will help you put a hole in the bottom to drain it down before it spills over the top. I'm not sure if you can develop a bigger cup. I just think you can figure out ways to drain it faster. Yeah. That might be that nature thing. Yeah.

It's your fixed cup size. I think you are to a degree. Yeah. Here's my analogy for that. Toyota truck, pickup truck overseas Highlux Yeah

20 people loaded into it A chicken coop A couple of goats And it's Suspension is bottomed out It's barely making it down the road A bird flies over And loses a feather

And that feather lands Right on top of that And the whole fucking thing collapses That happened to me and my truck was was completely overloaded and when the feather dropped on me it was a very insignificant event in my life but it was enough um instead of the 357 magnum it was my shotgun out back and I sat there for a few minutes in the yard and thought about how how to aim so that it would take out what I wanted it to take out and have zero chance of

survival and all that. And then I just, I kind of went, fuck this. I don't want, Lynn and her family to find me out here like this. And after I thought about that, I thought, time to call somebody. So I tossed it in the grass, got on my phone, and called a crisis line. It's a fire-specific crisis line. It's called Fire Strong. But I wasn't honest. If you're in crisis, they can help you. They'll send somebody out.

I didn't tell them that I was. I didn't tell them what I had just been sitting over there 30 feet away thinking about. And we disconnected the call. And I felt kind of okay, but then I started ruminating overnight. So one of the things I, you know, one of my symptoms is that I catastrophize. That feather that drops on the truck is the end of the world. And I make it up to be the end of the world because I keep thinking about it. I keep thinking about it.

I keep thinking about it. And I have no solution. All I'm thinking about is the problem and how it feels and how fucked up this is and how I have nothing. I just called crisis and they didn't help me. Well, I didn't let them help me. I spent all night ruminating on my situation. And the following morning, I was off, off duty. I made access to the equipment storage room at my fire station.

And I took the narcotics pouches out of six spare sets of gear. I checked into a hotel. I left a note on the door for the maids to not come in and to call the police. I wrote another note saying, please contact my girlfriend at this number, this address, put my ID on that, emptied the minibar, took the lamp shade off of the floor lamp, and set up an IV.

And then I lined up all of the narcotics from those six bags and started drawing up meds. At the time we carried morphine, Ativan, Versedad, and fentanyl. Those are all pain management drugs? Yeah. Yeah.

I drew up all of the first three and I actually ran out of space in the two syringes and didn't put any of the fentanyl in it. anybody medical that's listening will understand this but I I drew up 120 milligrams of morphine 120 of ad of van and 50 of Versed and I started an IV on myself had some country music playing and I slammed it all through the IV yeah telling that story is gotten easier since it happened, but it's still, it's hard to do. When was this? This was on September 12th of 2019. I didn't feel anything. I went to sleep. The last thing I remember was

holding the IV line, pinched off, pushing the two syringes at the same time. That was it. And in that moment, I felt relief like, this is finally coming to a fucking end. I'm not going to have to have all this shit in my head. I'm not going to have to smell smells that aren't there or feel feelings that aren't there because I'm safe in my home, but I'm still smelling them and feeling them and thinking about them and seeing them.

People talk about that being a selfish act, or a selfless act and not thinking about yourself or those around you. And I'm going to leave all of that alone because I don't think there's any changing for the most part what people think about suicide. A lot of people in the world think it's a mortal sin and that I will now go to hell for that. A lot of people would never think of hiring a retiree who has a history. of that, that they've put out into the world like I'm doing. A lot of firefighters in the city that I used to work in have no contact with me anymore.

Really? Because you told the truth about what happened with you? That'll make sense here in a second. When I ran calls, if I had a cardiac arrest patient that we're doing CPR on and hosing them down with Epi to try and get a cardiac algorithm back. I could look at that patient and say, you know, and be objective about it and say, okay, we're following our treatment protocols. We're doing our thing. Right now they're dead. And there may be nothing that I can do about it. That didn't bother me. The family that's either in that room looking over your shoulder or wailing in the next room over, with what we're

what always got me. Yeah, for sure. The way, the way a traumatic event like that or a loss affects somebody was, that was what kind of hurt me. Like, I know that this, you know, this guy overdosed or just had a heart attack or it was just his day. That is what it is. But the friends and family and everybody else that are left behind. They're missing their father, their brother, their son, their uncle, grandfather, her husband. And in that moment in that hotel room, I didn't think any of that. My girlfriend Lynn was a school nurse at the time. And she knew that something was up with me that day when she left for work.

And early on in our relationship, I told. her that I would call her at some point and tell her, hey, would you just talk to me? I need to hear your voice. And what that really meant was, we just did something completely fucked up and I need my feet back on the ground. And I did that several times. Over my time, I called her and said, hey, just talk to me. I just want to hear your voice. I called her from that hotel room. I said, hey, just say hi, I just wanted to hear her voice. She asked where I was. I said, don't worry about it.

I'm okay. Talk to you later. That was before I started drawing up meds. Drawing up that much medicine takes a while. That was probably 40-minute process out of these tiny vials. I was going to say, just drawing up me moving it from the tiny vial into the syringe. During the time that it took to get all that shit ready, Lynn went to the, cop that was assigned to her school and said, hey, something's wrong with Rick, we need to find him.

The cop says, no problem, I'll ping his phone. So they call PD dispatch, and the officer comes to her and says, hey, where would he be if he was near Scottsdale Road and Lincoln? And she knew the hotel that I was at. And I guess during that process, he asked, how do you know, how do you know? know that and she said well that's where we went for a staycation for his birthday last weekend and so the process of finding me started they sent officers to to the house sent officers to the hotel they found me they carry intranasal marcan which is administered through your nose

yeah all the officers here carry it as well yeah they they pushed all that um And then the crew from my station on the other shift showed up, and they saved my life. In addition to not thinking about my friends and family, I didn't think about my coworkers. And I just, I expected to be found dead days later, you know, at least 24 hours later and not viable. They'd call the coroner, and that would be it. I never thought that those guys would have to show up. They gave me all their Narcan and did airway management. We wound up in the ICU unconscious for days.

My life at that time was so full of different contrasts, you know, the highest highs and the lowest lows. And the last example would have been a 16-day road trip with Lynn in the western U.S. where we knew where we were going to sleep at night on day one and day 16. And we made up the entire rest of the thing as we went. It was amazing. Yeah, it sounds like it. Incredible. Just an incredible trip.

The first call I ran when I came back from that vacation was a heroin overdose. And he was not savable, but we were still working on him. And his mom was standing there. for the whole thing. High highs and low lows, man. They finally took the breathing tube, the endotracheal tube out, and they had been trying to get me to breathe on my own for quite some time, and finally I did.

And I regained consciousness, I think, three or four days after the incident. And I looked up and I saw a clock on the wall. It's the first thing I remember. What time was it? No idea. You son of bitch. Andy had been through a lot, so... Yeah.

I'm not sure I could even tell time at that point. I remember looking at the clock and doing the systems check. Like, you check your balls. And they're like, you know, am I all here? Am I, you know? Priority first. Am I good? Yeah.

Check the equipment, fingers, toes. Yeah. Huh. Okay. And I thought, how could that not have worked? Because I gave myself over 10 times what it would take to kill somebody. I was curious what the lethal dose was. Okay.

That didn't really matter. What mattered was I looked to my right and Lynn was sitting there. And I immediately felt more regret than I had ever felt in my life. She was one of the people that was going to be left behind. and whose life was going to be fucking shattered by what I did that I didn't think about. So the thoughts of the effect on people's lives after you leave them is one thing, but the potential for you to do things later in your life is something that a lot of people don't think about. some things have happened since.

So my treatment after that, I was flown to a place called the IFF Center of Excellence, and the IFF is the International Association of Firefighters. It's our union. And they operate a mental health and substance abuse facility. and they do inpatient treatment. So I fly there. The first night there, I start developing chest pain.

I wind up going to the ER the following morning, and I have pulmonary embolisms in both lungs because I had sat in an ICU bed for an extended for a week at that point, and then I took a four-hour flight across country. So that's a recipe for blood clots in your lungs. So I was readmitted and I was in another fucking ICU for a few days alone this time. I had a lot of time to think.

And then I finally got transported back to the center and started my inpatient treatment. I was there about 39 days. Not about. That's pretty specific. I was there 39 days. and I received the equivalent of five years of counseling compared to somebody that just goes once a week. I got about five years of that over the course of that time. And that included treatment by a psychologist who was assigned to me and diagnosis by a psychologist.

And within 30 minutes of sitting down with that psychologist, sorry, psychiatrist, psychiatrist. Chris, she had diagnosed me with severe anxiety, major depressive disorder, and complex PTSD. And I still didn't believe it. Even living through what you lived through, you still didn't believe it. I was a dick sometimes when I rode around on a fire truck, because along with the rest of my crew a lot of times, we spoke poorly of people who had come forward with PTSD. I'm not unfamiliar with that environment. It took a long time in the SEAL community for it to go from something that had a stigma associated with it to something that became a metric of actual strength.

Yeah. And I would say that battle is still ongoing. I think it really depends on who you talk to. Yeah, I think you're right. That stigma is one of the things that it's now my mission to eliminate. because I didn't I didn't show up to work for a week and run

you know bullshit calls that were not traumatic to anybody on the outside I worked for 27 years and I ran over 19,000 calls and I'm now stepping forward

and saying I have the experience I have the knowledge I have the diagnosis and I don't ever want to hear somebody do that again. Yeah. After my treatment there, and I actually met some lifelong friends there. I made some lifelong friends because we were going through the same shit,

and we support each other now when we're going through stuff. Were you still employed by the fire service when you were at the IFF Center of Excellence? Andy, until week three in that place, I thought I was going back. back and getting on a fire truck. Okay, got you. Like, okay, cool, fix me. No problem. But then that gradually changed,

and I made a tough phone call. I called my fire chief, and I said, chief, I think it's time that I not climb on a truck anymore. What can we do? And then he said, no problem. I got you. So we filed, and by we, I mean, a team,

of people back home helping me. We filed for a disability retirement, which was approved long after I got home and after a lot of independent medical examinations where I had to sit down and explain a lot of things and all my medical records and everything were submitted. But I also filed a work comp claim. Usually a firefighter with a work comp claim has something like a blown out knee or a back injury or something like that and they have a date of injury. When did you hurt yourself? Well, my date of injury happened to be when I hurt myself and I got approved. To my knowledge,

it was one of the first PTSD work comp claims. And prior to that, there was actually a legal measure. There was a bill passed that establishes PTSD as being presumptively caused by your career in the fire service. So if you're a firefighter and you wind up with PTSD, it is presumed that the fire service caused that. The same situation exists for cancer claims. So certain types of cancer, it is presumed that that came from the fire service. Both those make sense to me. Yeah.

So I come back. I get hooked up with an amazing psychiatrist. I get on a pretty light med regimen. I still meet with him. I have a psychologist. My counselor actually now specializes in public safety. We used a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy, but we also used EMDR, and that was what did it for me.

And we started working back through these traumatic events with EMDR. If you're listening and you don't know what EMDR is, Google it. There's a lot of good information on treating post-traumatic stress with EMDR. But it was hard, and like you mentioned earlier, it was hard fucking work. Because I had to go back through all of these. traumatic events. Yeah. Felt like I was reliving him again.

Because you are to a degree. You're chipping off rust a layer at a time. You are. Or plaque, I guess, would be a better. You're reframing how you think and feel about those things. And that's the magic of it for me. There's a bunch of different treatment modalities for PTSD. I don't think it matters what people use.

Whatever works, that's what you need. Yeah, the end state. It's all that matters. Yeah. And that doesn't matter to me if it's covered by insurance or not, or if it's available in this country or not, whatever it takes. Yeah. Because there's so much riding on this.

So I get home from the Center of Excellence and I'm getting my feet underneath me. I have lost my identity again because now I'm out of the fire service. I bury myself in archery and I had heard that I had heard from a very reliable source that there was a chance that somebody might come a knockin regarding the legal ramifications of what I had done. You know about the Vegas shoot?

At the concert? The Vegas shoot? Oh, not the Vegas shooting, but the archery Vegas shoot tournament. I do. I know about this from Dudley. Yes. largest indoor archery tournament in the world. I'd been training really hard for this

because I was shooting a lot when I did what I did. And then when I got home, I had time because I wasn't working anymore and I needed something to do. So I was training pretty hard for Vegas. And I had loaded up my truck and I was going to go pick Lynn up at work and we're going to go to Vegas for the weekend.

I'm pulling out of the cul-de-sat. and two black unmarked SUVs pull me over and do a felony stop. Put my hands out the window and I know what's happening and I know why. And I had pre-planning actually for this situation. Just because they have theft of the narcotics? Yeah. So they announced, they come to the door, they cuff me, this was in my neighborhood. Awesome.

I'm standing on the sidewalk and all I can think about is I'm supposed to be picking Lynn up in about 15 minutes. What, what the, can we get this over with? Or could you please call her? So there's three deputies there and I said, hey, my phone's in the center console. It's good, you know, somebody's expecting me. Can we handle this? So we call her on speaker and I said, hey, um, That thing that we talked about possibly happening someday is happening right now.

There's this long pause. Hey, Lynn, can you hear me? She said, yeah. That thing that we talked about happening is happening right now. And she said, are you serious? And then one of the deputies chimed in. Hey, this is so-and-so with the Arizona State Attorney General's office. We're arresting Rick and we're taking him to the Fourth Avenue jail.

You can go online and track his progress. Okay, love you, baby. Talk to you later. So I've been arrested and I got taken to jail and booked. What was the charge? I was charged with five class three felony accounts. Felony accounts. two of possession of narcotics, two of possession of a dangerous drug, and one of computer tampering.

And the computer tampering came from using the keypad to make access into the room to get the stuff. Gotcha. All the while I'm thinking, okay, if we leave by like 4 a.m., I think I can make Vegas. I'm in jail and I'm thinking, let's go. I got shooting at you. And it's February, so it's freaking freezing in there. Finally, they release me without bond. Without bail.

No, without bond. And I know what you're thinking. Arizona's in Nevada. That's out-of-state travel. wait a minute, you violated your trip? No. The only travel restriction was international travel. So I read that while I'm waiting for the Uber to come pick me up outside Fourth Avenue jail.

And I'm thinking, I'm free to fly. Let's frickin' roll. So I get home and I repack, Lynn repacks her bag. And we drive across the desert in the middle of the night, early morning, pull up in front of the South Point Hotel and Casino, and we're planning like, okay, I know registration on the second floor. If you drop me off here, I can make it up to, like, it's coming down to minutes, right? She drops me off.

I jump out with my Pelican case, run in there, put my bow together, get registered, and I shot a personal best. I like where your head's at. My head was pretty much at fuck everybody. Sometimes that's the best place to have your head at. Yeah. And I probably did so well because I wasn't thinking about archery. I was thinking about it.

Okay, so we're driving home from the Vegas shoot. And I forget. I think I made the first flight. Did well. A good weekend. Okay. I'm on my phone and I'm Googling. possible sentencing, class three felony, trying to figure out what this.

I'm facing, I think I was facing up to 30 years in prison. So while I was in, part of the plan was to contact my legal team, contact the union, do behind the scenes work while I was in jail. And we over the following months pled that down to a, class six undesignated offense for possession of drug paraphernalia and I was sentenced to probation and that's over now. Who drove those charges? Is that something that they had to do or did somebody? There was, they held a closed door grand jury session and presented this and the and a grand jury put those charges up.

there's a decision-making process, you know, after this. Okay, you're going to fight it? Are you going to, what are you going to do? And I thought the last fucking thing I want to do is put my fate up to another jury again, people that can't get out of jury duty, and then have them say, well, let's just sentence you to two years in prison. Or whatever they would have done. Or maybe some people on the jury got fucked over by a, firefighter at some point and they go 30 by you know there's a lot of risk there I'm in my my

late 40s at the time so you're free and clear of all the legal stuff at this point free and clear of all the legal stuff all this passes and Lynn and I decide that we're going to do DNA testing to to explore our family history and I'm especially interested in this because I still at that point don't know. The first one that we did, it came back with nothing for me. Like it had like a fourth or fifth cousin or something. So we get another one and months down the line from that, we finally send them in. And it comes back with a 100% match for my natural mother.

So I'm looking at this screen and I realize I think I just found my family. one thing leads to another I reach out to her and she's living 30 minutes away from me shut the fuck up soul brother 30 minutes away and that's after living in different places

all around the country there was another family member who owned a house and and she was living in that house so what was her response to hearing from you she told me that she was out of town celebrating a birthday with a friend at the time.

And she had seen this because she was heavily into genealogy. And she had tracked down thousands of relatives at this point. And she just thought, oh, it's just another, you know, person in the tree somewhere. And then she looked closer and realized that it was me. And she said, oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh. What should I? What should, you know, she's like beside herself. So, yeah, we took.

talked in there, that first phone call was, was interesting. There's kind of a vetting process. Like, are you really who you say you are? What do you want? That, you know, that whole thing. Yeah. Is the DNA testing true? Like, this is too good to be true kind of thing? And then she told me about riding a Harley Davidson by yourself. across the country. And she told me about her father, who won the Colorado State Bicycle Road Racing Championship as a junior. So you definitely come from a two-wheel family. I think we've established this. Yeah. And then she told me that I had six siblings. Wow. Are you still in contact with her? Of course. Well, I mean, I could imagine it going one of two ways.

people being super excited and happy and open arms and wanting to get to know one another, and then the exact opposite of that. Of course. So during the following, about a year, took about a year and a half, one of my sisters died in a plane crash in 1986 in Hawaii. but I have met all five of my surviving siblings. That's awesome. Yeah. And it's an amazing feeling sitting across from somebody.

And it's an amazing feeling doing that when you are in your late 40s and you have never met a blood relative before in your life. Who am I? where am I from? Is there a cancer history in my family? Is there a mental health history in my family? There are none of those things. I mean, that's good.

Yeah. It's really good. Yeah. Yeah, it's just to look across at somebody and see my eyes or my nose or my mannerisms. It's incredible. I struggle for words to describe what that feels like. It's one of the most amazing things. I had a retirement gig for a little over a year.

I was working on a project with a friend in a physician's group, putting a thing together, and that group has gone into bankruptcy, and so that's no more. So I just became a full-time writer and a full-time advocate and a full-time storyteller and had I succeeded in that hotel room on the 12th in 2019

couldn't have done any of this stuff and there was a reconnected with your family either nope how safe do you think you are from finding yourself in that place again I don't think anybody say from finding themselves in a situation where they feel overwhelmed and unable to cope and unable to deal with what is on their plate or in their cup or in the back of their truck at the time.

What I have, though, is a really robust set of tools. I've got an ultimate set of tools. My dad's a TV repair man. If you remember that movie. Yeah, but think about this. But I have tools that I can use to cope, and I have the ability to recognize signs and symptoms that I did not have any idea. even existed before this. So, yeah, I'm going to get overwhelmed.

I'm going to get kicked in the nuts repeatedly, and I may be laying on the ground incapacitated by whatever it is that's kicked me in the nuts, but I know how to cope with it, and I know that I have people supporting me in the form of my, professional caregivers

providers I've got an amazing girlfriend that by the way is still with me after all that shit a lot of people

would have walked away but she's stuck with me and we we got something that's amazingly strong yeah that sounds like because of what

what we've been through but she knows what to look for you can't treat something, you can't take care of something, you can't cope with something unless you recognize that it actually exists. You can't solve a problem unless you know it's there.

It's the first battle. And that was what I fucked up when I was riding around on a truck, making fun of people, like an idiot. You know, you described it as tools and a team. And I think it's a great parallel an analogy to the job that you had at TRT. You as a person to show up at a rescue scene,

but you had nothing to work with, you wouldn't have been able to do shit. You can't get lower down into a pipe or a cavity or high-angle rescue without somebody else up there to pull you back up. And it's only because you have those two things. You have the team and you have the tools that allowed you to save as many lives as you did.

It's a leap. It was a leap for me, and I think it's a hard leap for people that they need to realize that you need both of those things to really bulletproof yourself for what's going on between your ears. Because if you strip those two things away, holy shit. The mind is a dangerous thing. I know you've lost at least one friend.

I lost two friends. One of my main mentors in the SEAL community who I did my first platoon with. I had no idea what he was dealing with no fucking clue whatsoever and

you know I wish he would have reached out I wish I would have reached out more my hesitation or the issue I have with that is I don't know if he would have been honest because I don't have the ability to read minds you know and it's the same thing

as going at counseling how you doing Oh, fucking great. Had the best day ever. Just ha ha. Not that he was like that at all, but I had no idea. I had no idea that he was dealing with something that would terminate with him making the decision on a morning to walk outside. You know, when I ended all. When I was in the ICU this time, I've been in there a few times.

This, the other times, there's a parade of firefighters and friends and family coming through, you know, support. This time they blocked access, but a lot of guys got through. And these were guys that I absolutely love and respect and have worked with. They all gave almost uncomfortably long hugs. They also all cried. but what they also did was tell me that they had felt exactly the same way that I had felt when I did what I did.

There's a big problem out there. We are at the fire service. I'm going to say, public safety. I was going to say first responder. I'm going to go. People who are on the receiving end of a 911 call

who make their living responding to people's worst fucking nightmares, I think it touches, I can't say it touches them equally, but that fingerprint, the weight of that, if it didn't affect you, then you've got wires that are loose in your head. Sociopath. Yeah, if you could just, if you could just day after day, call after call, deal with that.

And it's just like Teflon and shit's bouncing off of it. I would say you have other issues that might need to be addressed. Yeah. Well, that was, that was me and all my buddies for a long time. Why did you, you said earlier that you lost contact with a lot of buddies that you had. What was the reason behind that? Yeah. I'm glad you brought that back up.

If you have that kind of a problem, if you have that kind of a mental health thing going on, the last thing you want to do is approach somebody that did what they did. Yeah. I think that, dude, in my department, it's just a little too close to home. And it's a little too hard for guys to talk about.

I've done public speaking in front of firefighters that I don't know, and it's relatively easy. Yeah. But when I'm talking to guys that I used to run calls with, yeah, everything's cool while we're talking, and then I'll usually break down at some point after. because these are my brothers and sisters, and I know exactly what they're feeling. It's a hard step, man, to reach out for help. Yeah. I mean, I've been there.

I say that speaking from personal experience. Fuck. I think the most important thing that you can do is keep talking about it and advocating. And as I mentioned, I'm writing about it now. I'm writing a book. Is it called? I wish I had been a cop?

No. Because that would be a sweet title for a firefighter. It's called Red is Better Than Blue. Yeah. No. It's called Flame and Fortune, how the fire service almost killed me. And when I was fighting brush fires and making more money than I ever had, 7.95 an hour. On the underside of my helmet at a fire at some point, I took out a Sharpie out of my initial attack pack.

And I wrote, I drew wings. and I wrote flame and fortune because I knew that there were always going to be fires they were always going to go out and I was always going to make money. Yeah, you can bank on all this. Yeah. So getting that together,

I'm going to try and finish that by the end of this year, get it published. But I also have a story that's, I think, compelling. and I can definitely be used to help mold departments, help support firefighters, help reduce the stigma, and establish a culture of truly helping ourselves. So, yeah, the public speaking thing is very attractive to me. If people are listening and they're in an organization,

that they think that this story would help them get their mental health message across, I need to appear at your Fire Academy. I need to go speak to your city council when you're trying to pitch more money for mental health care. Yeah, I think the earlier, I think the Fire Academy is a perfect place to start introducing this to absolutely. I mean, as early as humanly possible. Again, I'm not an expert in the between the ears stuff, but anecdotally from what I've seen, from what I've experienced, it's, it's not that anything is super heavy up front. It's the ounces become pounds and the pounds become tons over time. For sure. And when I went through my academy, I went through that first fire academy, then I went through a full-time academy. When I went

through those academies, I had no fucking clue what I was getting into. Yeah. Fuck, man. That is an incredible story. We have been out for almost three hours. What do you want people to get from your experience? What would you want them to understand if you had to distill it down? Yeah.

I want people to learn the lessons that I've learned without having to go through the experiences that I've had. Yeah. One last question for you. If you would have had a fourth helmet and another bike, would you have gotten back on the bike that day? Fuck, yeah. That's what I didn't think of it was. Yeah, I would have done the same thing.

I would have borrowed somebody else's motorcycle if I had to. And just wrap that shit around another, you know, just ruin. I mean, the best bike to ruin is one that's not yours. Yeah. And my thought process would have been, I have a championship to win. Yeah. I laid my dirt bike down. Fuck, two days ago.

Such an idiot. Were you wearing all your guys? Of course. And I was like, this is so embarrassing. I'm riding behind a buddy of mine. Who's, he's a cop. You know why the fire service was created, right? Cops need heroes too.

So just for full clarity, if there was a cop sitting there, I would reverse that joke. I'm just being. Of course. Nothing I love more. I trade Jiu-Jetsu and said there would be firefighters. I'm like, ooh, workplace violence. I totally support this. Who's tougher?

It's even better when it's two cops. like, yes, blue on blue. I'm following him. By the way, I fully support violins in the workplace. Violence? No, violins. They're very common. I mean, it could be cathartic.

Music for some people is. Sometimes violence is the answer. I'm not saying it always is, but sometimes. So I'm watching my butt. We're on a dirt road. It was my least favorite riding surface. Hard pack underneath, dust layer up top with rocks. and his fucking squirrel

runs out between me and him. And I'm going to tell you right now, I like shooting squirrels. There's ground squirrels out at my house that probably has burned down between the time we've been on this podcast. And so I watch it go and in my head I'm having this conversation.

I'm like shit talking to squirrel. I'm literally tough talking to ground. I'm like, oh, fuck you up. And I look back and I'm going way too fast. So I'm like, oh God, I'm not going to try to bend the bike over. So I just straight line it and just start bleeding speed,

coming to the edge, lay it down, jumped off, and did it. Like, it was not, we picked it back up and continued on the ride. But, yeah, not my finest moment. I've laid down every dirt bike that I've ever had. I've never laid down a street bike, and I would like to continue that trend. Yeah. I never rode dirt because I knew I would get banged up. Tractions, a motherfucker on those variable riding conditions.

Yeah, but here's the interesting thing about racing, like motorcycle road racing at the highest level. You're actually sliding the bike on the pavement. Oh, yeah, you can see it in the slow motion. Yeah, as it's torquing around the corner. Yeah. Man, I love two wheel things. I definitely have a mental illness. Yeah, I do too.

Rick, I can't thank you enough for, well, coming up here with Lynn and sharing your story and sharing your time. How can people find you? They can email me directly at Rick Booker 603 at gmail.com. It's not B-O-O-O-K-E. No, it's not. And it's R-I-C-B-C-H-E-R-603 at g-mail.com. Where is the 603 come from? That was the last station I worked out.

I was on Engine 603 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Awesome. I will let you close it out, man. What would you like to close with? From the depths of my being, thank you for having me up here. Yeah. I reached out to you pretty much on a whim two weeks ago, thinking, And I've been listening for a long time.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, long-time listener, first-time emailer. You know how many people actually start off their emails like that? Quite a few. Wow. Yeah. But I was getting kind of an end of this retirement gig that I was doing, and I thought, I recognize that I need a purpose.

Let's get going, finish that book. let's keep working to get the word out. What the hell? The worst he can say is no. The funny thing about that is you responded 10 minutes later. Sometimes people catch me in front of my laptop. And I went, oh, shit. I got to fly to Montana now.

That's not an ah shit. That's like, oh, hell yeah. Except for when the Montana portion or this portion of the state's on fire. Yeah. You know, here's the thing. Even in the job I used to have, the job you had at a, tactical level, you could change people's lives if you could physically touch them. When you start talking about the experiences that you have, you could help touch people's

lives that you'll never meet. And I think the more vocal that you can be about your job and the fingerprint and the weight that it leaves on you, the more impact that it can have. I mean, it's a purpose that's not much different than the one that you had previously. The scope and scale is an order of magnet. greater, if not multiple. Yeah, for sure. So. Yeah, if people are listening and they can use me, I'm available.

Let's do it. Awesome. Thank you again for taking the time, man. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Of course.