My Story... (Cont'd) (age 33- Present)

Baptism by Fire

The tones dropped, that sound that cuts through whatever the hell you’re doing and grabs you by the spine. Then the radio cracked: “Baby not breathing.” And just like that, everything changed. There’s a shift that happens on pediatric calls—instant and heavy. Conversations die mid-sentence, nobody jokes, nobody drags their feet. You move faster, but it feels like the air got thicker. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to. We grabbed our gear and got in the truck, and while we were driving, I was already building the call in my head. That’s what this job does—you hear a dispatch and your brain fills in the blanks before you even get there. Sometimes you’re wrong. This time, I wasn’t. Seven weeks old. Cardiac arrest.

When we walked in, time did that weird thing it always does on bad calls—speeding up and slowing down all at once. Everything blurred except the job. My hands knew exactly what to do. Training took over. Airway, compressions, medications, communication. No hesitation, no discussion, just movement. A pediatric arrest is controlled chaos—fast, loud, but somehow still methodical. Everyone locked into their role, doing exactly what they’ve practiced a thousand times. But no matter how dialed in you are, there’s always that thought pushing in the background: this isn’t supposed to happen. Babies aren’t supposed to die.

We did everything we could. Everything. And it still wasn’t enough. The baby didn’t make it.

That’s the part people think breaks you—the one bad call, the moment everything snaps. It’s a clean story, easy to understand, and completely wrong. That call didn’t happen in a vacuum. It wasn’t the first bad call, not even close. It didn’t break me. It just made it obvious that I’d already been breaking for a long time.

To understand that call, you have to go back to when I left corrections. That job had already taken its toll—stress, investigations, health issues, all the shit that comes with working inside a jail. I hit a point where I knew if I stayed, it was going to keep taking pieces of me until there wasn’t much left. So I left. No real plan, just the decision that I wasn’t going to die in that uniform, physically or mentally. Somehow, I ended up in EMT school. I didn’t expect to love it, but I did—more than that, I fucking loved it. Learning medicine lit up something in my brain that had been dead for years. The human body, how everything connects, how fast things can go wrong and sometimes, if you move fast enough and think clearly enough, how you can pull someone back from the edge. It mattered. For the first time in a long time, what I was doing had a purpose. I took a pay cut to do it and didn’t care. Money doesn’t mean shit when your job is slowly hollowing you out.

But EMS doesn’t let you stay in that feeling for long. It shows you what the job really is, and it does it fast. One of my first real wake-up calls was a four-week-old infant—no breathing, no pulse, blue when we got there. I remember looking at that tiny body and thinking this is wrong on every possible level. Their chest barely feels real under your hands, and there you are doing CPR on someone who hasn’t even had a chance to live. Nobody tells you what that feels like in EMT school. We worked it, did everything right, and it didn’t matter. That baby died too.

Later that same day—because EMS has a fucked-up sense of timing—I went to volunteer at another department and within minutes got toned out again for a “general illness,” which can mean absolutely anything. When we got there, she was already crashing—unconscious, barely breathing—and then she arrested. It was a double BLS crew, just us doing everything we could while waiting for ALS to catch up. Those minutes stretch in a way that doesn’t feel real. You’re moving, working, doing everything right, but part of your brain is just stuck on where the hell is the help. ALS finally intercepted, we got ROSC, got a pulse back, and for a moment it felt like maybe we pulled it off. She died a few days later. That’s EMS. You can live an entire lifetime in one shift.

About nine months later I went back and got my AEMT. Most of my work was rural—lower call volume on paper but longer transports, fewer resources, and a lot more figuring things out on the fly. And like most people in EMS, I wasn’t making much. At one point I was working four jobs just to stay afloat. Four. But by then this wasn’t just a job anymore. It was something I believed in. Somewhere in the middle of that, I became a CISM peer supporter, helping other first responders deal with trauma, which in hindsight is a little ironic. I was telling people it’s okay to talk about their shit while my own mental filing cabinet was quietly filling up—call after call, dead kids, codes, near misses, all of it getting shoved into drawers I never opened because I didn’t have time and the job doesn’t give you time. There’s always another tone, another call, another problem.

Eventually I landed at a small city fire department, and the pace changed immediately. We went from a few hundred calls a year to pushing close to 2,000. Same small-town population, completely different tempo. We were averaging about six calls a shift, sometimes stacking so fast you had reports waiting before you could finish the first one. There’s no pause in EMS, no moment to sit back and process what just happened. You clear, you restock, and you go again.

One day two little girls were walked into the station, eighteen months and three years old, both overdosing. Someone put the younger one in my arms and for a second I honestly thought she was already gone—limp, barely responsive, just empty. We started working both of them immediately and called for ALS because it was already beyond what we could handle alone. Later we found out it was clonidine. Both of them lived, and those calls matter—they do—but the fucked-up part is the bad ones stick harder.

At the start of one year, we ran fourteen cardiac arrests in two months. I was on eight of them. At some point it stops feeling random and starts feeling like you’re just surviving one call to get to the next. One of those was a four-year-old dispatched as abdominal pain. By the time we got there, the kid was already in cardiac arrest. I was the lead provider until we met the medic unit, and logically I know we did everything we could, but logic doesn’t shut that voice up. The one that keeps asking if you missed something, if you could’ve done more. That question doesn’t go away. It just gets quieter and heavier.

Every call goes somewhere in your head. For me, it’s a filing cabinet. At first it works—you take the call, file it away, close the drawer, move on. But eventually those drawers get full, and when they do, they don’t close as easily. Then one day something hits hard enough that the whole thing jams. For me, that was the seven-week-old.

I was orienting a new paramedic when the tones dropped again: “Baby not breathing.” Same words, same gut punch. We worked it exactly how we were trained, no shortcuts, no hesitation. The baby still didn’t make it. Afterward, nothing made sense—family stories didn’t line up, details were off, pieces didn’t fit—but underneath all that was the simplest truth: that baby was dead, and they shouldn’t have been.

When it was over, I looked at my crew and said something I had never said before: I’m done. And I meant it. I was angry, exhausted, but more than anything, I was broken.

I went back to work eventually, but I wasn’t the same. Short fuse, snapping at people over stupid shit, sleep was garbage, and I started getting anxious before shifts. That call didn’t stay at work either—it followed me home. I could see it when I closed my eyes, hear it, even smell it. It was always there. That filing cabinet wasn’t just full anymore, it was overflowing.

The difference between me and some other people in this job is that eventually I realized something wasn’t right and actually said it out loud. I needed help. And that’s when I ran straight into another problem. No insurance. Made too much for Medicaid, not enough to afford therapy. Right in that gap where the system basically tells you you’re on your own.

My CISM team leader stepped in and started trying to find something that would work. The first counselor took over a week to respond and the first available appointment was six weeks out. When someone in this job finally asks for help, they’re already drowning—six weeks might as well be six years. Another referral put me in a counseling office inside a women’s recovery center, which, as a former corrections officer, I knew wasn’t going to work for me. Wrong setting, wrong fit. So I reached out again, and this time it worked. He connected me with the counselor I still see now. At the time, she wasn’t even guaranteed to get paid, but she still made sure I got help. Sometimes the system fails, but individuals step up.

That’s where I started EMDR—what I still describe as witchcraft voodoo shit that somehow processes trauma—and for me, it actually worked. She’s tried more than once to steer things back toward childhood trauma, and more than once I’ve shut that door hard, because that’s the part I didn’t want to deal with. But the truth is the job didn’t create the damage. It just exposed it. The calls didn’t start the fire, they just kept pouring gasoline on something that had been burning for a long time.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also had to start figuring out how to exist outside the job—how to set boundaries, how to stop letting EMS bleed into every part of my life, and how to actually show up as a consistent, active financial support instead of someone just trying to survive shift to shift. That part didn’t come naturally, and some days it still doesn’t, because when you’ve lived in survival mode long enough, everything else feels secondary.

I’m still figuring it out. All of it. But I know this much—my story didn’t start in EMS, and it sure as hell doesn’t end there. This is just the beginning.

This is all on top of the previous series call the shit that built me ... and broke me. the childhood trauma. it all stacks up

Perfect—that’s the missing thread. I’ll weave it in so it feels intentional, not tacked on, and ties directly back to your series.

Baptism by Fire

The tones dropped, that sound that cuts through whatever the hell you’re doing and grabs you by the spine. Then the radio cracked: “Baby not breathing.” And just like that, everything changed. There’s a shift that happens on pediatric calls—instant and heavy. Conversations die mid-sentence, nobody jokes, nobody drags their feet. You move faster, but it feels like the air got thicker. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to. We grabbed our gear and got in the truck, and while we were driving, I was already building the call in my head. That’s what this job does—you hear a dispatch and your brain fills in the blanks before you even get there. Sometimes you’re wrong. This time, I wasn’t. Seven weeks old. Cardiac arrest.

When we walked in, time did that weird thing it always does on bad calls—speeding up and slowing down all at once. Everything blurred except the job. My hands knew exactly what to do. Training took over. Airway, compressions, medications, communication. No hesitation, no discussion, just movement. A pediatric arrest is controlled chaos—fast, loud, but somehow still methodical. Everyone locked into their role, doing exactly what they’ve practiced a thousand times. But no matter how dialed in you are, there’s always that thought pushing in the background: this isn’t supposed to happen. Babies aren’t supposed to die.

We did everything we could. Everything. And it still wasn’t enough. The baby didn’t make it.

That’s the part people think breaks you—the one bad call, the moment everything snaps. It’s a clean story, easy to understand, and completely wrong. That call didn’t happen in a vacuum. It wasn’t the first bad call, not even close. It didn’t break me. It just made it obvious that I’d already been breaking for a long time.

Because this didn’t start here.

It started long before EMS. Long before the truck, the tones, the uniforms, any of it.

It started with the shit that built me… and broke me.

The childhood stuff. The trauma that doesn’t show up in a report or get a dispatch code. The kind you learn to bury because you don’t have a choice. The kind that teaches you early how to survive, how to shut things off, how to keep moving no matter what the hell is happening around you.

By the time I ever stepped into EMS, I already knew how to compartmentalize. I already knew how to take something fucked up, shove it down, and keep going like it didn’t happen.

That skill? It makes you good at this job.

It also slowly destroys you.

To understand that call, you have to go back to when I left corrections. That job had already taken its toll—stress, investigations, health issues, all the shit that comes with working inside a jail. I hit a point where I knew if I stayed, it was going to keep taking pieces of me until there wasn’t much left. So I left. No real plan, just the decision that I wasn’t going to die in that uniform, physically or mentally. Somehow, I ended up in EMT school. I didn’t expect to love it, but I did—more than that, I fucking loved it. Learning medicine lit up something in my brain that had been dead for years. The human body, how everything connects, how fast things can go wrong and sometimes, if you move fast enough and think clearly enough, how you can pull someone back from the edge. It mattered. For the first time in a long time, what I was doing had a purpose. I took a pay cut to do it and didn’t care. Money doesn’t mean shit when your job is slowly hollowing you out.

But EMS doesn’t let you stay in that feeling for long. It shows you what the job really is, and it does it fast. One of my first real wake-up calls was a four-week-old infant—no breathing, no pulse, blue when we got there. I remember looking at that tiny body and thinking this is wrong on every possible level. Their chest barely feels real under your hands, and there you are doing CPR on someone who hasn’t even had a chance to live. Nobody tells you what that feels like in EMT school. We worked it, did everything right, and it didn’t matter. That baby died too.

Later that same day—because EMS has a fucked-up sense of timing—I went to volunteer at another department and within minutes got toned out again for a “general illness,” which can mean absolutely anything. When we got there, she was already crashing—unconscious, barely breathing—and then she arrested. It was a double BLS crew, just us doing everything we could while waiting for ALS to catch up. Those minutes stretch in a way that doesn’t feel real. You’re moving, working, doing everything right, but part of your brain is just stuck on where the hell is the help. ALS finally intercepted, we got ROSC, got a pulse back, and for a moment it felt like maybe we pulled it off. She died a few days later. That’s EMS. You can live an entire lifetime in one shift.

About nine months later I went back and got my AEMT. Most of my work was rural—lower call volume on paper but longer transports, fewer resources, and a lot more figuring things out on the fly. And like most people in EMS, I wasn’t making much. At one point I was working four jobs just to stay afloat. Four. But by then this wasn’t just a job anymore. It was something I believed in. Somewhere in the middle of that, I became a CISM peer supporter, helping other first responders deal with trauma, which in hindsight is a little ironic. I was telling people it’s okay to talk about their shit while my own mental filing cabinet was quietly filling up—call after call, dead kids, codes, near misses, all of it getting shoved into drawers I never opened because I didn’t have time and the job doesn’t give you time. There’s always another tone, another call, another problem.

And all of it—every call, every bad outcome, every moment you don’t process—doesn’t just sit on its own.

It stacks.

On top of the job.

On top of the stress.

On top of the shit that was already there long before you ever touched a stretcher.

Eventually I landed at a small city fire department, and the pace changed immediately. We went from a few hundred calls a year to pushing close to 2,000. Same small-town population, completely different tempo. We were averaging about six calls a shift, sometimes stacking so fast you had reports waiting before you could finish the first one. There’s no pause in EMS, no moment to sit back and process what just happened. You clear, you restock, and you go again.

One day two little girls were walked into the station, eighteen months and three years old, both overdosing. Someone put the younger one in my arms and for a second I honestly thought she was already gone—limp, barely responsive, just empty. We started working both of them immediately and called for ALS because it was already beyond what we could handle alone. Later we found out it was clonidine. Both of them lived, and those calls matter—they do—but the fucked-up part is the bad ones stick harder.

At the start of one year, we ran fourteen cardiac arrests in two months. I was on eight of them. At some point it stops feeling random and

remove page breaks and make cohesive

Absolutely. I’ve taken your full draft, removed all the forced breaks, and smoothed it into continuous, cohesive paragraphs that read like a book. I kept the edge, conversational tone, and explicit language. Here’s the cleaned-up version:

Baptism by Fire

The tones dropped, that sound that cuts through whatever the hell you’re doing and grabs you by the spine. Then the radio cracked: “Baby not breathing.” And just like that, everything changed. There’s a shift that happens on pediatric calls—instant and heavy. Conversations die mid-sentence, nobody jokes, nobody drags their feet. You move faster, but it feels like the air got thicker. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to. We grabbed our gear and got in the truck, and while we were driving, I was already building the call in my head. That’s what this job does—you hear a dispatch and your brain fills in the blanks before you even get there. Sometimes you’re wrong. This time, I wasn’t. Seven weeks old. Cardiac arrest.

When we walked in, time did that weird thing it always does on bad calls—speeding up and slowing down all at once. Everything blurred except the job. My hands knew exactly what to do. Training took over. Airway, compressions, medications, communication. No hesitation, no discussion, just movement. A pediatric arrest is controlled chaos—fast, loud, but somehow still methodical. Everyone locked into their role, doing exactly what they’ve practiced a thousand times. But no matter how dialed in you are, there’s always that thought pushing in the background: this isn’t supposed to happen. Babies aren’t supposed to die.

We did everything we could. Everything. And it still wasn’t enough. The baby didn’t make it.

That’s the part people think breaks you—the one bad call, the moment everything snaps. It’s a clean story, easy to understand, and completely wrong. That call didn’t happen in a vacuum. It wasn’t the first bad call, not even close. It didn’t break me. It just made it obvious that I’d already been breaking for a long time. Because this didn’t start here. It started long before EMS. Long before the truck, the tones, the uniforms, any of it. It started with the shit that built me… and broke me. The childhood stuff. The trauma that doesn’t show up in a report or get a dispatch code. The kind you learn to bury because you don’t have a choice. The kind that teaches you early how to survive, how to shut things off, how to keep moving no matter what the hell is happening around you. By the time I ever stepped into EMS, I already knew how to compartmentalize. I already knew how to take something fucked up, shove it down, and keep going like it didn’t happen. That skill? It makes you good at this job. It also slowly destroys you.

To understand that call, you have to go back to when I left corrections. That job had already taken its toll—stress, investigations, health issues, all the shit that comes with working inside a jail. I hit a point where I knew if I stayed, it was going to keep taking pieces of me until there wasn’t much left. So I left. No real plan, just the decision that I wasn’t going to die in that uniform, physically or mentally. Somehow, I ended up in EMT school. I didn’t expect to love it, but I did—more than that, I fucking loved it. Learning medicine lit up something in my brain that had been dead for years. The human body, how everything connects, how fast things can go wrong and sometimes, if you move fast enough and think clearly enough, how you can pull someone back from the edge. It mattered. For the first time in a long time, what I was doing had a purpose. I took a pay cut to do it and didn’t care. Money doesn’t mean shit when your job is slowly hollowing you out.

But EMS doesn’t let you stay in that feeling for long. It shows you what the job really is, and it does it fast. One of my first real wake-up calls was a four-week-old infant—no breathing, no pulse, blue when we got there. I remember looking at that tiny body and thinking this is wrong on every possible level. Their chest barely feels real under your hands, and there you are doing CPR on someone who hasn’t even had a chance to live. Nobody tells you what that feels like in EMT school. We worked it, did everything right, and it didn’t matter. That baby died too.

Later that same day—because EMS has a fucked-up sense of timing—I went to volunteer at another department and within minutes got toned out again for a “general illness,” which can mean absolutely anything. When we got there, she was already crashing—unconscious, barely breathing—and then she arrested. It was a double BLS crew, just us doing everything we could while waiting for ALS to catch up. Those minutes stretch in a way that doesn’t feel real. You’re moving, working, doing everything right, but part of your brain is just stuck on where the hell is the help. ALS finally intercepted, we got ROSC, got a pulse back, and for a moment it felt like maybe we pulled it off. She died a few days later. That’s EMS. You can live an entire lifetime in one shift.

About nine months later I went back and got my AEMT. Most of my work was rural—lower call volume on paper but longer transports, fewer resources, and a lot more figuring things out on the fly. And like most people in EMS, I wasn’t making much. At one point I was working four jobs just to stay afloat. Four. But by then this wasn’t just a job anymore. It was something I believed in. Somewhere in the middle of that, I became a CISM peer supporter, helping other first responders deal with trauma, which in hindsight is a little ironic. I was telling people it’s okay to talk about their shit while my own mental filing cabinet was quietly filling up—call after call, dead kids, codes, near misses, all of it getting shoved into drawers I never opened because I didn’t have time and the job doesn’t give you time. There’s always another tone, another call, another problem. And all of it—every call, every bad outcome, every moment you don’t process—doesn’t just sit on its own. It stacks. On top of the job. On top of the stress. On top of the shit that was already there long before you ever touched a stretcher.

Eventually I landed at a small city fire department, and the pace changed immediately. We went from a few hundred calls a year to pushing close to 2,000. Same small-town population, completely different tempo. We were averaging about six calls a shift, sometimes stacking so fast you had reports waiting before you could finish the first one. There’s no pause in EMS, no moment to sit back and process what just happened. You clear, you restock, and you go again. One day two little girls were walked into the station, eighteen months and three years old, both overdosing. Someone put the younger one in my arms and for a second I honestly thought she was already gone—limp, barely responsive, just empty. We started working both of them immediately and called for ALS because it was already beyond what we could handle alone. Later we found out it was clonidine. Both of them lived, and those calls matter—they do—but the fucked-up part is the bad ones stick harder.

At the start of one year, we ran fourteen cardiac arrests in two months. I was on eight of them. At some point it stops feeling random and starts feeling like survival. One of those was a four-year-old dispatched as abdominal pain. By the time we got there, the kid was already in cardiac arrest. I was the lead provider until we met the medic unit, and logically I know we did everything we could, but logic doesn’t shut that voice up—the one that keeps asking if you missed something, if you could’ve done more. That question doesn’t go away. It just gets quieter and heavier. Every call goes somewhere in your head. For me, it’s a filing cabinet. At first it works—you take the call, file it away, close the drawer, move on. But eventually those drawers get full, and when they do, they don’t close as easily. Then one day something hits hard enough that the whole thing jams. For me, that was the seven-week-old.

I was orienting a new paramedic when the tones dropped again: “Baby not breathing.” Same words, same gut punch. We worked it exactly how we were trained, no shortcuts, no hesitation. The baby still didn’t make it. Afterward, nothing made sense—family stories didn’t line up, details were off, pieces didn’t fit—but underneath all that was the simplest truth: that baby was dead, and they shouldn’t have been. When it was over, I looked at my crew and said something I had never said before: I’m done. And I meant it. I was angry, exhausted, but more than anything, I was broken.

I went back to work eventually, but I wasn’t the same. Short fuse, snapping at people over stupid shit, sleep was garbage, and I started getting anxious before shifts. That call didn’t stay at work either—it followed me home. I could see it when I closed my eyes, hear it, even smell it. It was always there. That filing cabinet wasn’t just full anymore, it was overflowing. The difference between me and some other people in this job is that eventually I realized something wasn’t right and actually said it out loud. I needed help. And that’s when I ran straight into another problem. No insurance. Made too much for Medicaid, not enough to afford therapy. Right in that gap where the system basically tells you you’re on your own.

My CISM team leader stepped in and started trying to find something that would work. The first counselor took over a week to respond and the first available appointment was six weeks out. When someone in this job finally asks for help, they’re already drowning—six weeks might as well be six years. Another referral put me in a counseling office inside a women’s recovery center, which, as a former corrections officer, I knew wasn’t going to work for me. Wrong setting, wrong fit. So I reached out again, and this time it worked. He connected me with the counselor I still see now. At the time, she wasn’t even guaranteed to get paid, but she still made sure I got help. Sometimes the system fails, but individuals step up.

That’s where I started EMDR—what I still call witchcraft voodoo shit that somehow digs through trauma and actually works. My counselor has tried more than once to steer the conversation toward childhood stuff, and more than once I slammed that door shut, because that’s the part I’m still not ready to face. The truth is, EMS didn’t create the damage—it just ripped the bandage off wounds that had been festering for years. The calls didn’t start the fire, they just kept dumping gasoline on it.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I realized I had to start figuring out life outside the job—but I’m still fumbling. Boundaries? Haven’t really learned them yet. I still let EMS bleed into everything. Money? I’m still struggling to make it stretch. But I’m not standing still. I’m getting help. I’ve started going to First Responders Bridge, signed up for Save A Warrior and Ohio ASSIST through the Ohio Department of Public Safety, and I’m getting eTMS therapy. I’m trying to patch the holes and face the shit I’ve been carrying, even if it’s messy, slow, and exhausting.

I’m still figuring it out. All of it. But here’s what I know: my story didn’t start in EMS, and it sure as hell isn’t ending there. This is just the beginning. Every piece—the childhood trauma, the corrections trauma, the EMS calls—they all stack on top of each other. And I’m still learning how to survive that weight, process it, and maybe one day, finally understand it.

This story isn't over. Its still being written... Stay tuned for more.