There are a lot of things about being a Firefighter that are tough. Without much thought or imagination I’m sure you could come up with a list as long as your arm. You don’t need to do the job to understand the pressure, the danger, the challenges.
Physical, mental, emotional. They are all there. Walk around with an SCBA on for an hour or two, and your shoulders start to tense up and your back begins to ache, I don’t care how fit you are. Stand in front of a roaring fire for 20 minutes and you feel like your body is burning inside a swimming pool. It’s an odd sensation. You’re soaked to the bone inside your gear from sweat, but at the same time you feel like you’re on fire yourself.
From time to time on the Fire Department, you’re going to see things that nobody should ever have to see. It will often come in the form a motor vehicle collision, but not always. Images that burn into your head like a photograph taken with the camera of your mind. They never really go away. One night you close your eyes, and the images will just appear, like they’ve been recorded on the backs of your eyelids.
Death is part of the job. You don’t really realize how much until you’ve done it for a while. That brings with it a whole different dynamic of stress. You’ll be questioning if there is more you could have done, or something you could have done differently. At the same time, you can find yourself trying to comfort a family member who is now in an emotional spiral set into motion by their loss.
I can’t stand sleeping with my socks on. If my feet are too warm, I simply don’t sleep. I like to sleep with my socks off, and my feet outside the covers to stay cool. If my feet are cool, my sleep is sound. If my feet are warm, there is either no sleep or restless sleep.
When I get woke up in the middle of the night to the pager, I’m completely incoherent for at least a minute or so. I sometimes don’t know who I am, where I am, and what that infernal beeping is that’s waking me up. Yet, instinctively, I always find myself getting dressed. Usually about the time I’m pulling my t-shirt over my head, I have figured out what’s going on.
No matter how hard I try, there is one thing I struggle with more than anything during middle of the night fire calls. My socks! I can never seem to put my socks on when I’m woke from a deep sleep. Pants are easy. The holes are bigger. Shirts, same deal, though I’ve stuck my head through a sleeve a time or two. Socks though, I just can’t get.
Believe it or not, there was an incident once that involved a rather painful tumble down the stairs because of my socks. I don’t know exactly what I was doing, but apparently I was trying to put my socks on while heading down the stairs. It didn’t work out so well for me. I told you… it takes me a bit to wake up!
One of the toughest things for me since then, is adapting to a life that involves sleeping with my socks on. It just seems to be a safer alternative. It also makes me appreciate nights out of town that much more because they are the only nights I can sleep sock free!
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