This was originally posted at Street Carnage you guys. Go leave a comment there so I don't get fired for sucking.
What did you do at work today? Oh, just saved a few lives with my bare man hands, doused a towering inferno with my giant water dick, then chilled out on max with my bros back at the crash pad playing video games and punching each other in the balls. Like ya do. If you’re a paramedic/firefighter, that is. Now that no one believes in 9/11 anymore, it’s been a minute since everyone was all about firefighters and emergency professionals, but it turns out these dudes are still out there pulling our broken bodies out of wrecks, pumping life back into our ghosts with science machines and nailing bitches in the back of the bus. I asked my old-timey boy from back in the day what it’s like to be ten times the man I’ll ever be.
STREET CARNAGE: Are you a paramedic and a firefighter? Do the two jobs overlap?
FIREFIGHTER/PARAMEDIC: Yes, I am and yes, they do. They go hand in hand. The bottom line of both jobs is life safety.
What’s the town like where you work? Are there a lot of calls?
The town I work in is a good size. We do about 2,800 calls a year, most of them are medical calls. I also work for a private ambulance company in a neighboring town where we do about 5,000 calls a year.
Do you have to be in a different state of mind for performing either one?
Sometimes you do. If we are going to a fire, it’s a whole different set of concerns. When we go out in the ambulance we are concerned about the patient, when we go to a fire our first priority is our own safety. There are a hell of a lot more ways to get dead in a burning building.
What do you spend most of your time doing? Jerking off at the firehouse, right? Sleeping it off? Then all of a sudden you’re thrown into a life-or-death situation?
Thank god we have separate bunk rooms ’cause I sure as hell don’t want to see another dude snapping his root. We actually spend a lot of time training and doing maintenance on the equipment. Sometimes you can take a nap, sometimes you can’t. We sleep far less than people think. One minute you’re chillin’ out watching the hockey game, next thing you know you’re scraping a drunk off the highway. But that’s what we signed up for, I guess. There have been some epic games of givesy takesy and Wii tournaments.
Givesy takesy, I should probably explain, is a game where you toss things at each other’s balls from across the room –- baseballs, telephone receivers, detergent bottles –- and the first dude to cry about it is gay, I think. So is it hard to switch it on when it’s go time?
You definitely get used to it. At first you’d get all jazzed up going out the door. Now I eat Chinese food on the way to a call and try and remember where the hell I put my pen.
How much training do you have to go through to do these jobs?
Paramedic school was ten months, and you had to do 400 hours of clinical rotations in the hospital, mostly in the emergency room and operating room. After that you have to do a field internship before you could take the state exam to be certified. As far as firefighting is concerned, I went to that Mass Fire Academy for 11 weeks. Pretty much boot camp for firefighters.
What are some of the nastiest scenarios you’ve come across?
Car accidents and people who shoot themselves in the head. Nothing good usually comes of that. The messy ones are the ones you remember. I had a guy get thrown from his car and then run over by it. He crushed his chest and blew a lung out of his arm pit. That didn’t work out so well for him. I had a shotgun blast to the face also. There wasn’t much to work with on that one either. Had a guy running from the cops and hit a bridge on his motorcycle. He lost his leg, didn’t know it was gone until we asked him where his leg was. One of the cops found it and handed it to me, shoe and all. You’d be surprised how mundane this job is, but the next thing you know you’ve got a leg in your hand. Those kinds of calls are few and far between. It’s a lot of repetition. Drunks are always a good time.
What’s the most likely way that someone can fuck themselves up? Car crash? Falling in the tub? It’s usually something mundane when people get hurt, right?
You can get fucked up walking to the mailbox, but car accidents are the most common. Everyone has a car and everyone drives too fast. It’s a matter of time before you smash into something. Or someone smashes into you. Or you could light yourself on fire while starting your grill with a can of paint thinner. I’ve seen it a hundred times.
Who’s the villain on the job? Meaning, who do you and all your boys bitch about all the time? The town? The higher-ups?
Most of the time we bitch about each other. That’s mostly because we spend way too much time together. But I would have to say we bitch about the town. Mostly the politics of a small town, you just have to shake your head sometimes.
What are the weirdest things you’ve seen people swallow or shove up their snatch or ass?
I’ve seen people swallow condoms filled with drugs to avoid arrest. Kids swallow everything. The weirdest thing I saw was a girl in rehab shove her works (for heroin) up her snatch. She actually forgot it was there and it started to stink a little bit. We had to take her to the hospital to have it removed. I couldn’t even bring myself to look.
Jesus Christ, dude. I need to walk that one off for a minute. Hooo. OK, I’m back. What’s the hardest part of the job?
The hours suck, and we don’t make nearly what people think we do. The hardest part to me is trying to forget about the nasty things I’ve seen. Memories like that just don’t go away. That and getting hit in the balls by a telephone receiver when you’re not expecting it.
Ha. What’s the best part? Saving someone’s life, I’d guess. Have you done that many times?
The best part is making a difference in someone’s life, whether you save a loved one or just treat someone with respect, alive or deceased, and they or the family truly appreciate it. It makes it a little easier to come back to work.
Do you have to develop a sense of dark humor to manage with what you do?
A very dark sense of humor. People may hear us joking around during a bad call, but what they don’t realize is that by doing that we are taking our minds off of whatever horrible thing is occurring and just reacting on pure instinct. It takes a while to develop that defense mechanism. Some people never do.
What do you think about the way the job is depicted on TV? Any shows or movies that get it right, or get it really wrong? What about Rescue Me?
Nobody has gotten it right yet, and nobody will. The only way to make it 100% authentic is to have guys that do it for a living do the show. But that would suck because we are not nearly good looking enough to be on TV. The show Emergency was the balls. It started it all in the ’70s. Rescue Me came the closest. The way the guys interact with each other in the fire station is spot on, that stuff really happens. The practical jokes and stupid conversations occur on a daily basis. Contrary to popular belief, we are not all sex-crazed, drug-fueled alcoholics. The following shows should have never been made: LA Rescue, Rescue 77 and Trauma. They were horrible shows that tried to make a job that is interesting to begin with more interesting. Sorry to anyone who may have been involved but they sucked. They made us look like a bunch of douchebags, and lately we can do that without Hollywood’s help.
Your brother does the same job right? Who’s better at it?
Well that’s a question that has plagued brothers for ages. He is more knowledgeable about the fire side of the job, and I am more knowledgeable about the medical stuff, and far more handsome. And no, we are nothing like the brothers on Backdraft. It’s good to have family who understand what happens at work. It does make for interesting dinner conversation.
Are people you work with generally in shape, or older and fatter? Do they tend to be college educated? Republican or Democrat?
We all try to maintain some kind of shape. There are fewer heavyset individuals on the job now, the whole health craze has definitely made it’s way to the fire service. Surprisingly many of the guys I know have degree’s in Fire Science or Management. There is a lot more education that goes on behind the scenes than people expect. As far as politics, we are mostly union members so by default you’d expect us to Democrats, but there are far more Republicans now who go against the union mainstream.
You’re married and such now, but is that old thing about chicks being into firemen for real?
It always helps when you can tell a girl at a bar that you’re a firefighter and not have to lie. I mean seriously, are you going to tell some hottie that you work at Taco Bell? They definitely go for the danger aspect, then they find out what we make and are gonzo. I told a girl I was a race car driver once just to change it up. I’ve known a few guys back in my private ambulance days that had women “dropping by” to visit at 3 A.M. We caught one of my buddies doing his thing with a Dunkin Donuts girl in the back of the ambulance. There is a lot of “dating” between medics and nurses, I suppose because we are always around. After a while we wear them down and they give in to our advances.
What do you think is one thing no one thinks about firefighters/paramedics that you wish they’d realize?
The majority of us are not alcoholic drug bags. Despite what you see on TV and read in the paper, we come to work out of some strange sense of duty. We are just regular guys, trying to make a living and raise our families. So give us a break, we are only human.
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