Showing results for "Fire Fighters" in Professionals & Academics

What is it really like to be a firefighter? How does it feel to respond to an emergency call, to know that someone's life hangs in the balance and every second is critical? What is it like to fight a fire, to battle through the heat and the smoke, to put your own life in danger to save others? How does it feel to rescue survivors, and what is it like to recover the bodies of those who you didn’t reach in time?

My career as a firefighter/paramedic stretched from 1974 to 2000 when were inventing EMS as we went along. These are stories from those years on the street. That place I named so long ago, the other reality that exists just outside most people’s everyday lives. It is a place that seems to exist parallel to the normal workaday existence: yet it is only a car accident or cardiac away for any of us. It manifested itself in brushfires, house fires, shootings, stabbings, hangings, accidents with injuries, cardiacs, codes, drownings, and a thousand other emergencies.