A publication dedicated to the well-being of firefighters across North America and beyond.
This week’s been a strange one. In our family, there’s a lot to juggle. I work full-time, my husband is on call to go fight wildfires as well as work his regular shifts, and we have two kids who are highly engaged in sports, friends, and activities.
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As first responders, we often talk about depression, anxiety, and PTSD, conditions fairly common within our profession. Given the stressors of our job, a high incidence isn’t surprising.
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As a species, our brains have kept us safe from predators, rival tribes, dangerous situations, and the environment for generations through our sympathetic nervous system and the fight, flight or freeze response. We are attuned at a very primal level to sensing danger and being ever watchful for it. We are even able to deal with very stressful situations, process these, move from fight, flight and freeze and then regulate, through homeostasis back to our rest and digest state. But something happened to us along the way.
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There are many good things about working in Fire. One of them is the sense of “brotherhood” and “family” that is frequently brought up. But a workplace bully can sour that brotherhood. But what happens when this isn’t the case? What happens when you are working in a station or on a crew that simply doesn’t get along?
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“In a fire, you can plan everything out to the minute, and a minute before that, everything changes,” says Dan Felix. Indeed, the repercussions of being exposed to the fire are something every firefighter is aware of, yet he remains undeterred. Whilst I continue to stay in nothing but awe and gratitude to our heroes, let’s take a look into what exactly happens when you get exposed to radiant heat from the blazing fires.
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Not so long ago, keeping your health in top shape was generally a matter of doing your day-to-day work. Most people had manual labor jobs that involved a lot of physical activity and they slept well at night simply because they were tired. There were no electronic devices to keep them sedentary or disturb their sleep. Pre-packaged processed food didn’t exist and food was either grown on their own properties or traded with neighbors.
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There’s an overload of information about nutrition and figuring out what’s true can be very challenging. I could fill multiple pages with nutrition myths that are floating around, but I will go over my top four!
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It’s common to think that being detached is not so great. Detached people are considered cold, aloof and indifferent. We make assumptions that if a person is detached, they must be disconnected from their work, family, spirituality or other important elements of being human.
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You are starting as a new recruit. You have trained hard to pass your fire department physical requirements, and you received a clean bill of health from your pre-employment physical. You did everything right - so now it is time to begin the best career in the world.
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It’s no secret today that as first responders, we are faced with a constant gauntlet of various types of traumas. In its simplest form, just showing up for a shift or call exposes you to a situation most in society will never experience, never mind endure time and time again. Big city, small town, volunteer or full-time, we immerse ourselves into the worst days of the public in the name of helping others.
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