This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511.
I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California and have used their products ever since.
From their incredibly strong yet light footwear to their cut uniforms for both male and female
responders, I found them hands down the best workwear in all the departments that I've worked for.
Outside of the fire service, I use their luggage for everything and I travel a lot and they are
also now sponsoring the 7X team as we embark around the world on the Human Performance Project.
We have Murph coming up in May and again I bought their plate carrier. I ended up buying real
ballistic plates rather than the fake weight plates and that has been my ride or die through
Murph the last few years as well. But one area I want to talk about that I haven't in previous
sponsorship spots is their brick and mortar element. They were predominantly an online
company up till more recently but now they are approaching 100 stores all over the US.
My local store is here in Gainesville Florida and I've been multiple times and the discounts you see
online are applied also in the stores. So as I mentioned 511 is offering you 15% off every
purchase that you make but I do want to say more often than not they have an even deeper discount
especially around holiday times. But if you use the code SHIELD15 you will get 15% off your order
or in the stores every time you make a purchase. And if you want to hear more about 511, who they
stand for and who works with them, listen to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with
511 regional director Will Ayers. I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the
Behind the Shield podcast that is Transcend. Now for many of you listening you are probably
working the same brutal shifts that I did for 14 years. Suffering from sleep deprivation,
body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido, hair loss etc. Now when it
comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy what I have seen is a shift from
doctors telling us that we were within normal limits which was definitely incorrect all the
way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left right and center. So I myself wanted
to find a reputable company that would do an analysis of my physiology and then offer
supplementations without ramming for example hormone replacement therapy down my throat.
Now I came across Transcend because they have an altruistic arm and they were a big reason why the
7X project I was a part of was able to proceed because of their generous donations. They also
have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first responders
through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual. So my own personal journey so far
filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood drawn and a few days later I'm talking to
one of their wellness professionals as they guide me through my results and the supplementation that
they suggest. In my case specifically because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago
and been very diligent with my health my testosterone was actually in a good place. So I went down the
peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology knowing full well the
damage that 14 years of shift work has done. Now I also want to underline because I think this is
very important that each of the therapies they offer they will talk about the pros and cons.
So for example a lot of first responders and shift work our testosterone will be low but sometimes
nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own. So this company is not going to try and
push you down a path especially if it's one that you can't come back from. So whether it's libido,
brain fog, inflammation, gut health, performance, sleep, this is definitely one of the most powerful
tools in the toolbox. So to learn more go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808
of the Behind the Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling. Welcome to the Behind the Shield
podcast as always my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome back
onto the show for the third time fire chief and author of Taking the Cape Off, Pat Kenny.
Now in this third conversation we discuss a host of topics from a recent fire that affected his own
family, a powerful trip back to Ireland revisiting multi-generational trauma, the hiring crisis in
the fire service and so much more. Now before we get to this incredible and powerful conversation
as I say every week please just take a moment go to whichever app you listen to this on,
subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single five star rating truly does
elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for others to find and this is a free library of
almost 900 episodes now so all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and
women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said I welcome back Pat Kenny enjoy.
Well Pat I want to start by saying firstly welcome back for the third time onto the
Behind the Shield podcast. I'm excited for that thanks for having me back again it really is an
honor. So we were talking before I hit record through a series of technical issues on the
podcast hosting site that I used to use I realized a lot of the old episodes really just weren't
available to anyone on Spotify and iTunes and all the main ones that they use so when this goes out
I would have also released the bonus episode because listening to our first conversation we've
done three now I realized what an incredible incredible conversation it was and obviously you
telling you know Sean and Eileen and all the you know the incredibly powerful story that you still
present with today so for people listening if you haven't heard episode 266 I advise you to hit pause
on this one go back and listen to that first and then jump into this but that being said
as we sit here today it is supposed to have a massive storm here in Florida at the moment but
where are we finding you on planet earth? So I'm still in lovely Donors Grove Illinois we too have
a storm that's come through today was snow and sleet and rain and I always kind of smile when I
was the emergency manager for the village on at the fire chief we would see the weather forecast
and we would put together this great incident action plan for horrendous things and usually if
you put that plan together you got two inches of snow so I'm sure they went through that last night
it has not ended up outside right now as bad as they said it was going to be but it's January and
Illinois so it's kind of what you figure is going to happen so but good overall good. Good yeah they
they close the schools here and the schools are the shelters when we have hurricanes and massive
storms and it ended up going I think pretty much north of us and yeah so there's some questions
as to why they close it but again had it come through and they hadn't closed then people would
be demonizing people for not doing it right so I say kudos to them for being cautious and being
prepared and the kids had one night of you know good sleep today. Sure 100% that's that that's a
you can't win situation so you always want to err on I protected versus I took a chance 100% I agree
kudos to them. So we were talking before we hit record and I've talked about this a couple of
times now for me 2023 was I can't even describe almost everyone that I love struggled this last
year family close friends everyone was in was in some sort of hole and I was you know trying to
be there for a lot of them I flew back to England twice to to be there for two different family
members at one point and so I know that it's been a challenge for you before we get to the specifics
though of some of the challenges that you and your family have found I can't help but feel like that
is now the tidal wave the ripple effect of the pandemic I think the last conversation we have has
come towards the end of it by that point but now in when I look back and reflect on 2023 I feel like
that was really when it revealed itself what happens when you know people are you know told
to to stay in their house and separated from their family and friends and all the things that we were
told to do it's a real real virus absolutely but I don't know if it was handled the best way I can't
help but feel like that has been the ripple effect that we've seen this last year so before we go
into your specific family stuff which I'd love to dive into as well you are you know you've really
got your pulse on the mental health element especially when it comes to our profession
what have you observed as far as the ripple effect this last 12 18 months you know one one thing and
I don't know if it's tied to the pandemic we've had this discussion a lot in my travels but there's
a consistency to it no matter geographically where you're at it's really getting difficult to find
men and women who are interested in going into the fire service and going in ems and the kind
of the knee-jerk reaction has been well the pandemic did that there's because it brought in
the reality of not only were you putting your own life on the line which for most of us we were
always like okay as long as I'm not impacting anybody else I'm okay that's what I signed up for
but at that point with the pandemic you now were worried about bringing it home and bringing it to
your wife and your kids and significant other but I don't think that's what it is I'm sure that it
had some kind of an impact on it but I mean here in Illinois it used to be if you were running a
test for a full-time position in a department you'd have a couple hundred candidates now there have
literally been some tests that have been run in the last six months here where they had nobody
and so the pandemic I think yes more awareness but what I'm seeing more of is the offshoot of
the pandemic that's not ems is people really started to value their family time together
kind of ironic sometimes you were forced into a family situation and maybe you were like okay
this this was nice in the beginning but this is going on a little too long we're on each other's
nerves and kind of the human part of it but I think that value of sitting around the kitchen table
that value of playing a game together that value of having mom and dad around kind of cemented that
family stability and so now all of a sudden you're going back into the real world and it was that
trauma of people being told to go back into their offices well you were you were had an option maybe
if you were in that kind of environment to work from home and a lot of businesses have altered
their model and to allow people to do that unfortunately you can't work a full arrest from
home and you can't work a working fire from home and so you have to be in a building and you have
to be available for 24 hours or whatever your shift would be and a number of the younger people
are are not really up for that they want that family time when I came in it was a security was
really a big part of this profession it's what you got it you weren't going to get rich you
weren't going to get a bonus for doing a great job but you were looking forward to a pension at the
end that you would be able to lead a decent life when you retired because you knew your body was
going to be beat up by the time you were you're in your mid-50s and now the pension is not really
that important now it's we can go make a living usually you're having both parents working so
there's there's enough finance coming in to have a decent living and if I'm not real comfortable
with the job I'm doing and I have a chance to have more family flexibility by going to x
I go to x and so I I see in our service the fallout is finding people who are going to be
finding people who are comfortable with the downside of the profession as opposed to coming
to the glorified side of it and then running that seesaw balance of okay yeah I am going to be
working on Christmas Day and I am going to be working on my wedding anniversary however I'm
also going to have time off that I could take the kids to the zoo on a Tuesday afternoon that some
other dad wouldn't have the pleasure and I'm still getting enough benefit emotionally like that
emotional bank account is getting enough deposits about feeling like I'm making a difference that
I'm willing to take the other side the downside and live with it which I think you do in any
profession and that's been going on for a few hundred years but I really think ours came under
the microscope with that whole work environment and I know there are departments out there they're
doing research now about you know forget the 24 48 forget that any kind of a model where you're
gone for an entire day can you break it up so that mom or dad is home for breakfast to see the kids
off to school or home for dinner and how do you do that with staffing models how do you do that
with the budget impact I know they're creatively trying to do it because they're finding that
their staffing is beginning to be drastically overburdened because what used to be a nice
overtime shift to have some additional money to buy kids gifts at their birthday or Christmas
now is like too much I'm living in that fire station and that's not healthy either.
No I think I mean you hit the nail on the head I don't think that you know the pandemic itself
specifically has certainly revealed in some departments you know a lack of support from a
department the moment there were vaccine mandates and things like that you know you're part of this
tribe and you know you literally will die for that badge that's on your chest you know performing the
service that you signed up for but then when that tribe turns their back on you obviously when you
talk about mental health organizational betrayal that's a whole other conversation but I think
you're absolutely right when firefighters were sitting around truly playing cards waiting for a
fire specifically the old schedule was fine it just was you know but in 2023 with our men and women
running you know literally 24 hours the answer is not I don't think it's even to break up the day
because the the swing shifts and all those ones are awful I mean look at our cops look at our
doctors and nurses they work those shifts you know but to give them more rest and recovery in between
and I think that the hiring crisis that we're seeing is more so that absolutely rightly so
there was an inertia from the pandemic a lot of people didn't work for a while and we're trying
to get them fired up again but now you can research what does it actually look like to be
a firefighter and like you said back in the day prior to me coming on you know the generation
before me they had a good pension they had you know medical insurance so they carried through
their entire retirement then when I came on they were cutting pensions the medical insurance went
away it was cobra for a year after you leave you know so some of those kind of carrots on the sticks
went away but you still want to serve so you're still not as worried but then you start seeing
all the things that happen to us when we work 10 15 20 years and now that's you know out there
on the internet so a young candidate is going to research now and be like wait a second when
they're understaffed they tell me that I can't go home you know and you've seen this more and more
and more so we're in this vicious circle so I agree with you a thousand percent until we turn
it around and invest in our men and women and give them more rest and recovery so the 24 72 I think
is the gold standard I think 24 is fine for a fire station when you have beds but you've got to give
people more time off if you're going to stay up all night you have to give them the time to recover
before the next shift and that is how we get people lining up outside our profession wanting
to do the job again the desire is there but they're not idiots they also understand that this looks
absolutely awful at the moment it's up to us as a profession to fix it so we can bring people back
and I think it's the the um the fear of that you're going to destroy the culture by just making
changes that for our for our benefits and I don't see it that way at all I would have a Chicago
training chief um Pete Van Dorp who one one time when I was getting ready to do Sean's talk he was
like Pat just tell me that you're not going to be another one of these guys that stands up there and
goes we've got to change our culture so I'm so sick of hearing that he goes I see that we need to
improve our culture so that means we hang on to the things that are still worthwhile and valuable
and then we improve them just like when we started you know you weren't riding on the tailboard you
started wearing air packs you weren't wearing three-quarter boots and I really give him credit
for that because I use it all the time anymore and say especially when you're dealing with your
health we know now things that we just didn't know before um that sleep deprivation every time I read
a sleep study it makes me a little nauseous because I think of how much I pushed myself through and
without knowing it um and that realizing what some of the long terms effect are when you get to be
I'll be 67 in May when you get to this point when you start to forget where your keys are and I can't
I've got 412 pairs of these you know cheaters because I lose them you really begin to fear
is this dementia am I am I is this what's happened to me and as opposed to okay I'm 67 you're going
to forget it sometimes we didn't know now and you hit right on it they do and I really push
departments when you're doing your orientation not hiring when you're doing your orientation
hiring when you're doing your orientation do you hit head on the challenges these men and women
are signing up for did they walk into the year in orientation watching Chicago Fire and they're like
whoa this is this is amazing and yes there are parts of the job that are absolute you can't even
describe them even tv doesn't do them justice however do you tell them that at some point
they're going to come across a call that is just going to go right through their heart
because we the irony is in every country the number one ingredient of a good firefighter is
get somebody who cares then we expose them to the worst situation you could ever expose them to and
we act shocked that it bothers them so do you tell them up front do you invite their significant
other to come to the orientation and say hey you're going to see some stuff that nobody should ever
have to see some smells that you're never going to forget and when that happens that's normal
and here's what we have in place because we know that's going to occur to help take care of you
to get you back hold to bring you back to your loved ones whole so whether that's what we're
going to do additional sleep we're going to look at nutrition we're going to have our own psychiatrist
who's part of our response team but whatever that would be you need to tell them up front what's the
challenge and then more importantly here's what we're going to do if your loved one wants to join
our family here's how we're going to go about it instead we ignore it until it hits the fan and then
it's like oh my god but we're in emergency crisis mode and the people have done their homework ahead
of time have got to be sitting in the orientation going so every day is nirvana in this job for 30
years nothing ever goes wrong you're never sad you're never pissed that you're here you're never
no that's not reality well they're not telling me the truth so i'll go do something where they
tell me the truth and we pride ourselves on our value of honesty let me in your home on your worst
day and you're not looking over your shoulder if i'm taking your rolex watch or if i'm doing
something i shouldn't be doing because you know i'm honest but we don't start off right away with
being honest with them when they walk in the door and god bless them if they choose after they walk
out of their orientation to go boy this wasn't what i thought it was it's not for me or your
significant other and this is a true story what would be a year ago of december a number one
candidate went through an academy flew through flying colors valedictorian came out of an academy
first day on shift was in december the shift was talking about yeah you know we drew the holiday
draw this year so you'll learn how this goes kid but if you get new year's eve you'll get christmas
eve you'll get it just kind of and then next year it'll rotate out but we do a family thing our
department's very involved on holidays so the families come down cook dinner together and
this kid's just staring at him and they're like what's the matter said you mean i have to work
christmas day they're like well yeah i thought he was kidding the whole day so well yeah you
don't get to go home for a few hours no the whole day but then you'll be off the next couple days
blah blah well this young man went home and had a discussion with his significant other that was
just husband and wife and on that following monday he resigned and the chief was shocked and and also
whatever every other consideration as a chief you would have about staffing and financial impact and
it's like what do you mean and he said i didn't realize that i had to work 24 hours on holidays
and my wife wants no part of that now that took a lot of courage to do um but it's it's a reality
and if they had said and the significant other was invited during the orientation
they could have shortcut it what ended up being a very difficult decision for a family and i always
use the analogy when i have about the cape going you hand a man or woman the cape when they walk
in the door of the academy they're not giving it back even if they should based on their significant
other impact or what it does to them they're not giving it back you're either going to take it from
them by firing them or they're going to wear it through that entire career and be full of holes
some of which you can never fix and i think that that's one of those areas we we're just missing
the ball and and i respond a lot of chiefs will sometimes get upset with me when i said that and
go hey pat do you realize how hard it is for us to get somebody in the door and now you want us to
tell them all this stuff at orientation yes i do because if they're not leaving in the beginning
when they should they're going to be a problem at some point along the way and you will have
contributed to injuring them and you as a chief have said your number one thing is to protect
your people well start before they ever get hired i love that i mean talking about the
honesties i have literally put a kind of call to action this new year for courage in the fire
service and when you you know you talk about courage immediately like what are you talking
about we go into burning buildings we cut people from cars we hang off cliffs on ropes whatever
it is and it's like yeah we do but where is the courage for us advocating for the work environment
that will not only benefit us physically and mentally but also benefit our family dynamic
we're absolute cowards because what happens when you talk about the 2472 oh that'll never happen
they'll never go for it well excuse my language what a pussy attitude that is i thought you were
you know a courageous warrior and yet when it comes to your own wellness you're not willing
to put up a fight at all you know there is no sense whatsoever that the people making decisions
about when you work work 40 hours and go home to their own bed every night but you're trying to
you know you're saying it's not worth the fight to push back on why you work 56 hours a week
80 with a mandatory that week you know this is the problem is that we've become so um god what's the
right word uh castrated basically you know we're so beat down we're so tired that we don't have to
fight where it actually matters and we talk about it's for them well let's not forget the more we're
beaten down physically and mentally the worst firefighters we become so we're not only advocating
for ourselves and our family which should be number one before the job even but we're actually
pushing against the very thing that will make us fitter that will make us be able to think faster
on our feet and assess a fire or perform a you know a cardiac algorithm or whatever it is
and so we're beating our chest saying it's for them and it's not it's for them the people in
the cities and the counties which is a complete false economy too because they're bleeding money
because all of us are falling apart because of the way that we're worked no that's a great point and
i i we've had some spirited discussions with a lot of chiefs so i have an incredible amount of respect
for i said you know even if you don't want to take the moral view about you're taking care of your
firefighter look at it from a total business sense investment you've put in that man or woman who now
starts to break down who starts to get injured both physically and mentally and now they're off the
job and you're bringing back people on overtime that you're depreciating their value as human
beings because you got to force them back because you have no choice if you put the investment in
on a proactive side and yes we haven't studied it for a number of years to be able to show exactly
what that end savings would be but financially there's no doubt in my mind you would save on
that and you would have a much more healthy crew one that would last longer one that the morale
would be but i mean there's so many positives about it but i do think we get into that rigidity of
it's got to be this way and we're not taking enough time to read the studies because they're
scary and it goes we have to change the way we do business well how are we going to do that
well you're going to have to experiment and some of it's not going to work and that research and
development is going to cost some money yeah but you're still doing it for your people and i can't
help but think that the men and women who work in your department if they know you're trying things
because you think it will improve their quality of life yeah every firefighter is going to find
something wrong with everything it's me included but they're going to see and go we're going to
give that a try because maybe that will make my home life better maybe it'll make me feel better
maybe i won't have as many nightmares i've got somebody to talk to so many positives can come
out of it and if we don't do it we're going to be forced to do it at some point and the whole model
of how many people we send to a call what their proficiencies are and whatever we're going to let
down the public that we took that oath and swore that we're going to protect we're not going to be
as good as we were because we're just too depleted the one thing i get asked a lot is can you send me
studies that prove that a 42-hour work week would be healthier than a 56-hour work week
and i just look at them did you just ask me that you know do you want to study to show that if you
stand in the middle of a freeway and you get hit by a car it's detrimental to your anatomy like
where do we draw the line and i've said this a lot the other thing i would also put people is
show send me something that justifies the fact that you don't think you're worthy for a 40-hour
work week but the people in the offices are you get up all night you get up to save lives they push
papers have you know parties in the office with cake and pizza no one is working you know all day
every day no one any profession look go see a construction site they're not working all day
the road digger is not working all day everyone has high you know times they're working and downtime
as do firefighters but until someone can explain to me why a firefighter should work 56 but anyone
else should work 40 no one can because it's insanity we've devolved from the you know the
cards and the dalmatian and you know the steamer you know this is where we're at now so this is the
problem and i talked about this a lot i don't want to you know get on my soapbox and talk again again
again but we have told ourselves a myth we have the most amazing schedule i work one day on i have
two days off but we don't the work week is a work day in civilian world is nine hours with a one hour
lunch so eight hours we work three hours shifts shoved together so we work three days on one day
off so we don't work 10 days a month we work 30 days a month that's why when you add it up the
math is like oh okay actually that's kind of shit now 24 72 would be a 42-hour work week it would be
an extra 24-hour period because that second day you just got off shifts you worked eight hours
when you get off so you've only got that third day it's even a day off that you're getting ready to
go back on shift so that extra 24 would be life-changing for so many people and they'd
start to be able to get a little closer to baseline when they come back and do the next shift so this
is what's crazy is that no matter what the oh yeah but thing that comes back it's always nonsense
the reality is the men and women in uniform deserve to have a work week that allows them to thrive
and they deserve to be able to go home when they're done with their shift not be told that they have
to stay shift after shift after shift well i think that word courage you brought up it it made me
think when when it came up and i remember back being i was a young chief so this is in the
early to mid 90s and um our shift the night before had been out on a on a working fire and
had been up most of the night and the it just happened to be that the shift was coming on the
next day and we were short we were small we're only five person shift this one tiny station
and a couple of guys were were sick legitimately sick they'd been sick from their previous tour
they didn't even come back for a fire and you know if a firefighter doesn't come back for a fire
they're sick so we had two people who had to stay over and i remember it was lunchtime and
both these guys were dead to the world in their chairs watching tv out cold and it was came to
one o'clock and the lieutenant was like chief can i just leave them in the chairs i mean they're
shot i'm like absolutely well about an hour later the village manager came down happened to walk
through the day room saw two guys asleep in the chair at 1 30 in the afternoon and all of a sudden
i had an irate boss in my office chewing me out about what what do you know what the public would
think of this and i'm like the general public wasn't out there in those horrible conditions
it was a freezing cold night those horrible conditions trying to save somebody's home and
best yet save the neighbor's home have not slept at all and i go and do you want one of them working
on your dad who's got a cardiac arrest 20 minutes from now who doesn't know one end of the box from
another i go i'm okay with them sitting there and if you got to discipline anybody you can discipline
me and we have to be okay with realizing that we're dealing with human bodies and what you're
putting them through we are all i don't always like the athlete term because sometimes i think
it gets taken in the other direction but but you absolutely are training to put your body
to a stress point and to be at its maximum what it needs to be to keep yourself your partner and
whoever you're responding to safe and realizing what it does to you and being okay with we're
going to replenish sorry if you you don't like the visuals of it that's okay you'll really like the
visuals when a great sharp crew shows up at your house in your worst moment and i think it takes
courage as the leader to stand up and go that's what we're going to do and if that doesn't work
for you i'm okay you really need to get another leader because then i can't look them in the eye
and go i value your safety as a profession it appears that we've done a terrible job educating
the public on what we do which is then why we have so many issues especially with these politicians
you obviously have a much you know more veteran perspective than i do only at 14 years total in
the fire service where have we gone wrong that to the fact that people are asking you know what are
we buying you in the grocery store or complaining that there's a crew working out in a local gym or
you know why is there a fire engine on my medical call when for example we've done ems a lot of us
for 50 years now right i think there's the the fear of look behind the curtain um i think for so long
our profession at least when i started the men who were in my fire station when i first
went in we were doing 24 48s most of them had second jobs where they worked at least eight
hours if not more on their two days off because that's where the income to support their family
came from the fire service did not i was i was a high school teacher before i went to the fire
service took a pay cut to go be a firefighter and so there was kind of this feeling of like
well you didn't want to tell your neighbor that you had two incomes even though your neighbor's
first income was more than you were making work in two jobs so there was this feeling of like
we need to be very very quiet about what we do and why because it's going to sound like we're
bragging instead of going out front and showing the public yeah this is what we do and why do we
do some of the things you might look and go well i can't go shopping in my job what why i know
there was a fire chief that ran into this this is years ago and um a lot of pushback and he sat with
the union said no no problem i'm not going to give into that and have people not go to the store
because i'm okay with that but i want you to do when you go to the stories because i want you to
have a card table in the back of the emails and then when you go in and have somebody set it outside
the store with the card table and offer to give away free pub ed stuff and do blood pressures
so you're only going to be in there for half an hour just do that and let's see what happens
and the response was amazing from the people in the public going holy cow i saw that fire truck
parked there and it always used to bother me but they put my kin on or they took my mother's blood
pressure whatever it was we were afraid to do so that inspired me we had an open house once
and i said guys we're going to do a fashion show well immediately you know where their heads went
relax not that kind of fashion show here's what i want you to do i said we're going to get people
to come out and when the open house is busiest and first you're going to walk out in your turnout
gear then you're going to walk out and just your ems with a scatoscope then you're going to walk
out with your dive suit then you're going to walk out in a hands-med suit and so we then we did
technical rescue must add 11 different outfits that people walked out in and when they were all
standing out then we were a very small department we only had 35 people i said every one of the
people you see who works here can do all those functions now in your business is there anybody
in your business that can do that many functions that at the at the snap of a finger has to be able
to jump into that function i said that's why these people do what they do that's why they have to
have the time off that they have to have because many times when they're off they're also going
to school because most of these professions require continuing education do you have a
continuing education in your job that you'll lose it if you don't do it they do my medics do
and it's their job and in james it was the reaction again simple thing i mean but people were like
amazed going up shaking the guy's hands going oh my god i never knew this and the feedback from the
guys was well we just thought they knew i mean if they call for a dive rescue who do they think
somebody from alabama's coming i'm like they don't know and it's our fault we need to be okay with
blowing our own horn you know you know how this is you want to embarrass the firefighter you give
them an award especially at a board meeting we don't want to blow our own horn but you need to do
that in order to let people know otherwise if you want to blame somebody then you got to look in the
mirror because we just didn't tell them and i think that's where we've missed the boat and i think
that's also why we're struggling with the recruiting is we're still not telling people all the neat
things that we do including then what do we do when we have to handle the things that are difficult
and traumatic to take care of ourselves absolutely yeah i've had some of the professions that in the
special operations community that aren't known for writing books obviously the seals everyone tongue
in cheek said every seal writes a book but you know you hear this this term the quiet professional
the silent professional and absolutely i mean obviously you're not going to want to know the
things that you shouldn't know about that group but there's so much value in the lessons that
they learn and some of the storytelling and now you know some of the delta guys and green berets
and pj's are out you know writing about their you know stories and being more public because otherwise
like you said we don't know what they do and there's a lot of value to us knowing parts of what these
people do and it's the same with the fire service and i always point this out who is the jocco
willing of the fire service yeah you know what i mean who is our spokesperson who is the who is
the one that's out there you know we don't have that so again if you aren't educating the public
then they just get to make up their own stories and then that's bolstered by us walking around
going oh my god it's the best job in the world you know we only work eight days a month you know so
we feed into this this fantasy oh yeah so i think you know whether it's the the people writing books
and i'm writing my second one now and i'm hoping that it's going to get made into a show because
i want to i want to show the real side and i don't mean that to be doom and gloom but the grittiness
of what it actually is is like to be a firefighter the inability to save sometimes all these things
that just don't make it to you know chicago fire and i had chick on the show and i know
the result of the script isn't always what he's written you know it's then taken by hollywood and
ah let's let's make it a happy ending kind of thing so you know where is the representation
we've got ladder 49 we got only the brave we've got a handful of shows that kind of touch on it
a little bit but we as a profession individually and nationally need to do a much better job
of educating like you said not just to the public understands what we do
but the real recruits the real candidates can see this is the good this is the kind of shit side
you know are you ready let's go right no and i think though um one of the things that i
run across that's interesting to me is do you know who does sometimes the best job of their
own advertising our volunteer fire departments not your career organizations ones who run
god bless them who have a five thousand dollar budget and that includes everything that they're
going to have for the entire year and might run 25 calls a year but they depend on the community
to fund them and they fill the community in on exactly what they're trained to do how many hours
they train what they train on and the other thing they do that's that's enlightening to me
is they tell them the truth do you know if you get if you call at three o'clock in the afternoon
we only have two people in town who are able to come back to go out with that crew because
all of the rest of us are working out of the community so just realize that that's what's
happening do you think if you work from home now you might be available to come in and would you
like to join our special team or and they've really struggled for the last 15 years on recruiting and
retention but they're still holding their own because the community needs to know i have a chief
who taught me very early in my career he said your job is to tell the village board what they don't
want to hear not what they do want to hear if you really believe your staffing is too short if you
believe your response time now has gotten impacted by traffic or whatever you need to make a report
and not a there's a dead baby in the road report details statistics do your research and say you
get to make the ultimate decision on what is the quality of care we provide i get that i don't i
don't have the budget strings but if i don't tell you what we struggle with and where we need to go
then that's on me because if i'm a village board member and that comes up at some point i'm going
to go excuse me sir you've been in the fire service for 30 years you've been our chief for
15 and you never told me that your people struggle with from sleep deprivation maybe you should have
told me that and we have to sometimes believe in those folks to do the right thing too and so i
think when leaders get they can also get pigeonholed and told well you none of you care about us i
don't think that's true either i think we have to educate them and then give them a chance to care
and i think sometimes we don't do that well i think another thing that i see when it comes to
you know the the politician side as well is the tax cuts like when does anyone ever explain to
a member of public that when we cut this tax you know that results in a minimum lower staffing or
even a browning out or a closing of a station that you know yeah so the so the tax are being cut but
the people aren't getting money back you know so as as the delivery of someone trying to say is as
the delivery of service diminishes the public aren't getting a refund oh we're going to give
oh we're going to give you crappy a service but here's you know five grand back this year
they're not so they're not educated on the impact of some of these political decisions too
and if a family knew or if it's say you know a community knew that by making this cut the
nearest fire engine or rescue might be 10 miles away now instead of five that would change the
way they think completely that would change the way they vote but again we don't do a good job of
explaining to people nationally i would argue of the you know the the life safety impact of some
of these budget decisions you know so i think that's another area is really getting people
to understand that as you said like we're jack of all trades master of none if you call 911 or 999
in england or you know with all the other numbers and the people you expect to come don't come
your children are going to die i don't think there's anything more you know powerful than
really storytelling and illustrating that point right and i think that when i've seen referendums
go out um one of the fears i'll see when it doesn't look like they've educated about okay if this
doesn't pass what's going to be the downside is well we don't want to be accused that we're
trying to scare people so well you're not scaring them if you tell them the truth if you're lying
about it and trying to get them to vote because you want to scare them then yeah you shouldn't
even be in our business but telling them up front because nobody be included sitting in that booth
going oh my god another tax hike for what we got to give you the for what and we also have to tell
you then we didn't just walk in here because we're looking for more toys and we're looking for more
people to fill a building we're looking for it because we've identified a risk that we can't
handle and we need the resources to do that and then you leave it to them but most people just
look at it when they see a referendum for a fire station and go no we got enough for that well
that's because you haven't told them what happens if you don't absolutely well i want to circle back
to 2023 then i know you know you had some you know some pretty traumatic issues and for people
listening to episode uh what i say it was 2266 and then 676 if they heard that one as well um you
know they'll know all the trauma that you had personally obviously some of the calls that you
had through your career um talk to me about last year because obviously there's there's a couple of
issues specifically that uh you know hit you pretty pretty hard for two different reasons
yeah um i'll start with one that um i would have never believed would have happened so i retired in
in january of 2021 i had the honor to work for two different fire departments hensdale fire department
in western springs and i worked with some of the best men and women out there i i was incredibly
blessed i always said i would have liked to have been the chief of a large department i had two
small departments and found that it was a gift because i got to know everybody and got to know
their families and and was the recipient of that support from both organizations it when shawn was
sick and passed and then when eileen was sick and passed but on july the fifth of this past year
my middle son patrick and my daughter liabby and my my two granddaughters the the absolute
best things that have ever happened to me caroline and mave um only live about 20 or 25 minutes away
from me and i got a call from my son there's a big storm coming through thunderstorm and about 6 30
in the evening and uh so dad he goes the lightning hit and there's a power line down uh and it's
arcing between the two garages um what what should we do and i go did you call 911 he said yeah i
said well don't go outside stay in the house unless you smell smoke and as i'm saying and
i'm praying i'm going please don't arc towards their home well it did and a few minutes later
he called and said yeah it smells like smoke i think the garage is on fire and there was a knock
at the door and it was the firefighters who had arrived that were evacuating them what had happened
was it was a primary line that came down between could have gone either way to their garage or
another ended up hitting their attached garage electrified the garage ran up into the soffit
and literally electrified the whole home at one point the gutters are blowing off you so the
responding units could not make entry until the electric company came to kill the power and i've
had a couple of those fires in my career as an incident commander and there is no worse feeling
than standing there with 20 or 30 people willing to go to work going to do whatever they want in
the family watching you all stand there because there's nothing you can do so i get i get the
call now for the first time in my life i'm responding it in we joke in our area a lot of
times when fire chiefs retire all of a sudden they have more scanners and more radios than they were
had in their entire life and they chase fires um i have not done that this was the first fire that
had come in since i retired that was like i need to go so what was my first reaction downstairs in
my basement right here behind me over my shoulders is the closet and in that closet was my bunker coat
that i was given when i retired um wrapped in plastic up on the top shelf and i hung up the
phone and i ran down the stairs and i tore the plastic open and i pulled the bunker coat out
now i did it for in my mind i'm never going to get past the security line with the police because
i don't have lights and sirens i got a private vehicle i don't have it i don't have any my gear
anymore this might at least get me through the lines i believe that was part of it i also believe
the other part of it was that was my i was going back to my cape like this is going to help how the
hell who knows but it's going to help so i'm driving there now no radio so i have no idea
where this is going have they knocked it have they not knocked it i'm i'm literally on my bluetooth
calling every chief that i know responds to that on a mutual aid and they can't get an answer which
is not a good time i pull around my son had texted me and said dad you're not going to get close to
the house because the storm was so bad the streets were flooded you're going to have to park at least
a block away and i remember i turned on the block and so i could see at the end of the block their
home and i took one look and i went oh my god it's gone and they were just going to the roof at that
point so it's probably 25 30 minutes into the incident before they're even starting to go put
water on the fire it had run the whole roof line it was down into the first floor and i walked up
first found my son and my daughter-in-law and uh there is absolutely nothing you can say at that
moment other than i'm so glad you got out my two granddaughters thank goodness were at what are
at a relative's house so they didn't go through the trauma of it but i said let me go find out
where things are at so i walk up to the two chiefs that i both of whom i've known for 20 years
and as i walk up they turn around and go well you finally started to chase fires and i went
no i go that's my son's house and the one chief looked at me and said oh my god patty told me his
dad was a firefighter he didn't say it was you they go so where are we at and so they gave me a rundown
and said hey if there's anything you need to do or feel like you want to do here you just you just
let us know we'll hand you a radio and i go it hit me at that moment and ironically everybody there
all the all the white coats and there were loads of them all had yellow reflective trim my coat
because it's an old old coat has red reflective trim and in the still pictures afterwards that
somebody showed me said we could tell you were wearing your cape and i went back to my car and
i took my coat off because i'm like i can't do anything and i'm thinking like what can i do and
it's like i really think it was up above whispering to me you just need to be their dad and i went over
and just hugged them and cried and watched as these guys just did a remarkable job to save what they
could and and i watched the care they provided to them just going back and checking on them and
filling them in where things were at and why they were doing what they were doing and then
taking them through that horrible walkthrough afterwards where i things are toys are floating
and clothes are all damaged and you see a crib that's full of the plaster that's come down from
pulling the ceiling all that stuff that i'd seen loads of times in my 40-year career but none under
these circumstances and i left feeling so empty like all those years and there was nothing i could
do and i had to reframe okay yeah there is something you can do now you've got to do something going
forward to help them with the process and you just need to be there and if that's all you can do
that's okay because right now there's no other choice and for my friends who found out about it
later in fact a number of them who saw something through social media called me with this very
hesitant voice because they thought it was my house that burned down and they were like oh man
this guy this guy he's got the biggest black cloud over his head and you have to have that
conversation where you go well it's kind of a good news bad news the good news i guess is it wasn't
my house the bad news is i wish it was my house because it was my son's and trying to rebuild
through the summer and watching them go through the whole insurance process because we respond
and we do the best we can in that acute situation and we leave it as good we can and then we leave
and we don't really see the other trauma that goes on as they try to rebuild their lives whether
you go to somebody and you get there and their parent is deceased or you have a house fire where
they lose everything we're gone i now live through watching them go through the rest of this and
their resiliency their courage we talked about that earlier was so inspiring to me that it kept
me going because they were not going to let this beat them they were pleased their girls hadn't
gone through the trauma so trying to explain to a four-year-old we're not going to be living here
for a while but you're going to get to go back when you do you're going to get to pick the color
we're going to paint your room we're going to reframing it even through all the lines that we
had gone through it was like hey i got nothing to complain about here i just need to go is there
anything else that i can do and and the other thing that came out of it that was powerful
and and i struggle sometimes with and we had this discussion before we started like people
always ask me okay you convinced me to take the cake off how do you put it back on again
well whatever inspires you when you go through a trauma to want to get back in the ring whether
that's that's life in general or it's in our profession that night literally on the front
lawn while it's pouring they had neighbors come over and it's a young family neighborhood
neighbors come over who said our parents have summer homes in indiana or wisconsin or whatever
we're going to pack up our car right now and we're going to drive up there for a couple of weeks
just go into our house till you get yourself settled do you see where i saw the best of humanity
come out that night in the worst situation and it made me feel like yeah cape ain't working for me
but that guy and that girl they've got the cape on because they've seen a trauma and they can do
something about it and just that support um was incredibly powerful and so we we've made our way
through that we had a very nice christmas they're in a ironically they're in a home
renting in the next community over from where their home was in western springs where i was
the fire chief so they're kind of known that they're in the neighborhood and uh and people
have been phenomenal there and by the end of summer they'll be back in their home and they'll
be living in a wonderful neighborhood again in the grange park that they had before but it's the
journey and uh the bumps in the journey something i would never would have anticipated being touched
directly so that was the first one well just uh kind of reply to that one i think it mirrors
what i've talked about somewhat recently which is the again we were saying what is not discussed
when we're you know told about the fire service especially when we have our orientation and it's
the inability to save and i have just been you talk about black cloud i have never saved a full
arrest in 14 years i was just that that shit magnet everything that you could die from is what
i you know the patients that i had from gi bleeds to you know aneurysms all the things um and it just
is what it is and it was interesting as you were standing there you with the coat on but more so
the crew that was on scene the that cape when you're when you make a save when you do the thing that
you're known for is the thing of immense pride but when you are the paramedic or the firefighter and
you can't save that person's child there's almost an element of shame wearing that cape because
everyone at medic school and everyone in fire academy told me if you did a b and c you'd have
an outcome d and here you are now standing in the street and some mother is screaming because their
infant just died in your arms you know so i think that's a powerful you know perspective
the other one that occurred um occurred on november 1st and that date is a real special
date for me because that was the date um when eileen was getting close to making her
journey to the other side and uh and sean appeared to her in our room and told her he was going to
come get her so it's always been a very special day for me and uh this year it wasn't uh or 2023
it wasn't so my my niece um her 40 year old husband um had a massive heart attack um in the
morning and died leaving behind four kids um nine and under um this guy tony went one of the biggest
the irony one of the biggest hearts of people that you would ever see um just a wonderful husband
a great dad had taken his kids trick-or-treating the night before um and the next day he was
gone and trying to get the courage um i don't know that i thought about in the moment about okay i
gotta find somehow find a cape because i knew i couldn't save her i knew the pain she was in
and gonna go through and there was nothing i could do about it but it was like trying to search for
what do you do how do you how do you have this conversation and tremendous support from her
they were very close family in-laws brother-in-laws everybody was one big family so they had built a
phenomenal family unit that really they didn't realize they would need for this kind of event
but they they were there and when i finally got a chance to talk to her
i said we we have a common ground but we don't i said you went through three losses there in those
minutes you lost the love of your life your spouse but you also lost the husband of your children
the father of your children but you lost your best friend too and i go people don't realize
what it's like that when you grieve you're grieving almost like in silos for for some of your moments
i go you're going to be battling through that feeling that that injustice of we were going to
have 40 years together and i lost my husband and then you're going to go into another room that's
going to be how am i going to raise these four children and then you're going to go in another
room like when i'm when i'm alone and tired and don't think i can go on the person i would talk
to the most i can't talk directly to them and i don't think i i thought i was going to be
i thought i felt really helpless on july 5th standing on that lawn i think talking to christina
alone in a room and trying to find the right things to say was incredibly difficult and and
i wrote about it in the book about when you run into that sometimes the best thing you can do is
just hug somebody because you don't have anything verbally to make it better you just don't and and
so i squeezed her and just said these people will be here they're not going to abandon you and and
it's really going to suck and there's nothing else we can do at that point and she's been amazing
her family's been amazing going through you can imagine going through the holidays um her oldest
son had a birthday only a couple of weeks afterwards and she's an inspiration to me what she's done
um she's trying to wear the cape and i'm sure more times than not feeling like she's she's not
doing it but she's she's doing amazing and all the other people around her or family the people
who love her friends are all trying to do what they can to to help but it's just another reality
check of you think you have everything planned out and then something like that happens and i
i think it wakes everybody up to go yeah tomorrow's not promised to everybody and you really do need
to make a point of telling people you love them all the time and realizing when you're fortunate
you have it that way because at some point you may not and how you adjust to that um like i told her
i said if you get out of bed in the morning you have made an incredible accomplishment and you
need to celebrate that because for this day that's the gold standard and eventually hopefully through
help and assistance you're going to be able to climb a little bit higher but for right now
the bar is set real low because you you couldn't be up against anything that i could imagine it
could be any more difficult than what you're facing and i'm so proud of her and her family
am i right in understanding he was a firefighter no no he was not he was not okay i must have must
have misread that though it was his his brother is a firefighter okay that's what it was then
our brother's a firefighter my nephew right so with you know all this trauma that you've had you know
watching watching your son's house burn down and then you know losing this loved one as well and
then trying to be there for your niece what was some of the things that you started leaning into
yourself we talk about putting the cape on let's not even think about the cape specifically just
your own self-care and all this you know grief being pulled up from the past as well i think i
had to first of all become come face to face with limitations um because usually back to when we
train the very beginning it's like there really isn't anything you can't do if you put your mind
to it well not true uh if i could bring tony back i would have been done november 1st so what were
what are my limitations um i found myself having flashbacks found myself having nightmares um and
so immediately like i preach don't always follow um i called my counselor and said i need to come
in and i need to talk to you um i've had a couple things happen and i go and i'm not in a good place
and went in and had very frank discussions with her about what was going on and she's like
yeah you're reliving it because what i didn't mention was november 1st tony went to heaven
well eileen's anniversary is november 5th so it was that loss watching her pain
having the services and then reliving the pain of seven what was seven years ago in november
and realizing that i needed to still tell myself there were boundaries you can't bring him back
you can't save the day here you can't make everybody happy so do what you can and realize
when you're getting too close because there are plenty of other people who are with her who are
more equipped to do what needs to be done than you are and be okay with that don't be helpless be
her uncle be there be available be comfortable with the uncomfortable and that's far enough
and then i really leaned into my faith and she has a tremendous amount of faith and i'm
so thankful for it and i and i told her i go there's loads of times through this journey now
where you're gonna go you're gonna question it and i go and that's okay you should question it but
if you didn't have it if you didn't really believe he was somewhere safe that that he's
gonna watch you and he's gonna try to take care of you from a different spot i said you wouldn't get
out of that bed and you i said i wouldn't still be here if i didn't have my faith and so i i leaned
back into that i talked to the pastor at our church and i said can you just pray for their
family on a regular basis i don't even know what you can say but whatever you can do to have
somebody up there listening if they can make their day just a little bit easier make one of the kids
maybe smile to give a little bit of anything at all i go i'm all in whatever you can get do it um
and that that helped and then obviously talking to my own family about it to the people in my
inner circle about i don't know what to do and getting reinforcement for you doing the best you
can um that that was and continues to be very helpful what you were talking about not having
the words i think that's that's hard as a man you know because men i wanted to be fixers but then
when you add in a male firefighter you know we're a fixer who fixes you know it's a double whammy it's
it's a compounding effect that's something that i've i've had to learn is it's okay not to say
anything it's okay to simply just as you said either sit down and be there and be quiet with
someone or let them talk or you know just give them a hug and not try and offer a solution of
something that can't be fixed just to simply be present and be there with them right right no and
it was um those are those are the things i think when we go through in life whether you're you're a
firefighter or whatever you're dealing with in life um when those traumas hit you first they knock
you on your ass and then it's trying to get back up and figure out what's the first step you take
how do i how do i get back moving forward because i can't just stay in this horrific spot
and for most of the time you need help to get out of there you need somebody to throw you a line
whether it's a counselor or it's a clergy or it's a really good friend or somebody to help pull you
just inches forward and you may not even see or feel the progress until you look back a year later
but somebody's got to intervene because we weren't created to live alone we were created to be part
of this team and we forget about that sometimes and usually when you get hit with that trauma i
think it knocks that team family concept totally out of your head and you need to lean on it even
more that there are others who may provide what i just don't have right now and if you look at it
that if they were in the situation you are wouldn't you want to try to help so give them a chance let
them do whatever it is because that may be the one thing you need that particular day
on a more macro perspective we touched on the pandemic you know and then obviously the the
police issue and the covid and now you know ukraine and palestine you name it insert thing here
i've watched the country become very divided deliberately from certain groups you know but
then even if you look at the fire service we are very fragmented there's not a lot of communication
between departments you know police and fire or county and city or whatever it is how whether
within our profession or even nationally how do we rebuild that community and tribalism that we
seem to have lost certainly the last eight plus years or so i think part of it is um what used to
be the strength probably at least looked at that way by by most of the services were you were always
kind of the old joke about well okay then you know if we're going to stop by the firehouse policemen
are going to come in and they're going to look at your lazy boys and the firemen are going to
wonder why you got powdered sugar on your shirt you know in the whole nine yards there and we
kidded about that but we definitely had our pride of our barriers of what this is my culture this
is your culture never the two shall match and i i always get a kick out of um sometimes when
somebody will recruit me to be a speaker um they'll find out that i'm a firefighter and not a police
officer and they'll be they'll say well this could be a difficult audience you could be talking to
and i go why i said just because i i didn't wear that kind of badge um this is a huge i'm talking
about a human problem not a fire service problem not a police problem it's and so i think we built
those walls so i mean you look at fdny and nypd and 9-11 and and the discussions afterwards about
the lack of communications and having all these barriers built that you couldn't get through to
each other and the angst that that created and i've talked to some people from fdny and this is so this
isn't you know gospel at all but it's like there's still so much frustration about them being able
to communicate and that's certainly not just for them that goes that goes across the country even
little rural departments that well we don't really respond with them well why not well some chief
40 years ago pissed off the people in our organization so we don't we don't go it's like
you you gotta be kidding me right like we need we need to drop those and realize
we're all on the team the same team that's the human team and part of the human element and so
working to build each other's team as opposed to making mine better than yours is where i think we
need to go and so more conferences and education where we meet together so not so much the education
the formal education you're getting is going to be the most important but the networking
my brother-in-law god rest his soul bob passed away from als and we always used to kid about
your i could never do your job he would say i would say to him and he'd go
but i think i could do yours and i said why is that and he goes because i have to do mine by myself
and he goes you're right you'd never last five minutes alone in a squad car by yourself but he
goes i really like being part of a team so i think i could i think that's right and when we would talk
about the similarities of what we went through 90 of it was the same 10 kind of unique to each
profession but we're afraid to talk about that because you certainly didn't want some police
officer to know that you thought like he did because there might be something wrong with them
then i mean so so getting groups together and breaking down those walls that we we don't it's
not your territory in my territory it's our territory and if we don't have each other's backs
who will who's going to understand looking at the face of police officers at attention when a coffin
goes by about a police officer who's been killed in the line of duty we know what that feels like
but well that's no different so why are we not reaching out so that we're responding so that
we're going to those funerals so that we're showing support that we're we're trying to promote training
that brings all of the professions together some of the best places i've gone to speak that were
the most i shouldn't say best but were to me the most fulfilling was when the audience was a mixed
audience it was fire it was ems it was police it was dispatchers it was prison guards it was you
name it and they were all invited because they were seen as the first responding profession you
help people who are in trouble you protect the community okay well then it's one common voice
it's a lot easier to discern the message than if i got to get it translated through the firewall
the police wall the dispatch wall and i think but that's a concerted effort back to what we talked
about with the educating the public and educating elected officials about work day and we it gets
pushed way down yeah that's a good idea we'll do that someday and then it's like saying you're
going to get together with your favorite couple and realizing a year's gone by and you're in a
wake together and you never got together if you don't make a point of it and make it formal and
have the leadership set up to do that it's just going to keep get a can kick down the alley
absolutely well just as a side tangent you mentioned bob with als did he play football
when he was younger basketball player oh so not because it just seemed like there was a correlation
between head trauma and als later in life right i have read i read some of that no he was he was
really good basketball player good athlete and just noticed that he had a numbness in his hand
now his his life another one talk about inspiring like my niece um he was diagnosed and for nine
years fought als he worked as a police sergeant he was due to be promoted to deputy chief told
the chief i can't take it because i don't know how long i'm going to be here and how long i'm
going to be um he one vow he had i am never going to spend a day in a wheelchair or in a hospital
bed his so for nine years he battled als he was in the beginning still mobile started to lose the
use of an arm and another hand and but still could his family was amazing the madden family
his his wife buoy and his kids um all amazing would help him to bed everything and finally it
had gotten really really bad his choking reflex was really difficult he had just retired from
the police department his police chief was amazing in terms of supporting him so he could went to
work every day and finally his wife buoy was like baba it's just too hard now to handle you
we're gonna have to get a wheelchair and we're gonna get a hospital bed and it's gonna come on
monday and i'm sorry but it's something we need to do and put in the living room and
so eileen and i went over there that sunday and he was still in rare form i made some crack about
police versus fire and he kicked me from the lazy boy he was in and uh great great next morning at
six o'clock in the morning we get a phone call that he's passed the morning the bed and the
wheelchair were supposed to be delivered now his wife buoy would go for a run in the morning that
was her that was what kept her mental health and he was awake and she kissed him goodbye before
she left and when she came back he had gone to heaven and one of the first people she called
was my wife eileen who was her and bob were like this and when we got there there was no look
of fear on his face but there was a look of determination and i knew that look from all
those years i had known him and i really believe in that time she was gone he had a discussion
with somebody on the other side and said for nine years i've never i never heard him complain i have
never complained about this i told you if you're going to give this horrible illness to somebody
in my family give it to me and you did but i am not going in that wheelchair and i am not going
in that bed so you need to get me the hell out of here before my wife comes back and watches me pass
and i i can't wait to get to heaven to find out if he goes typical you were wrong but i want to be
able to have that conversation because i believe it he he he was done fighting and he was not going
to go it's an amazing story because i don't believe in coincidences no coincidence that he
passed that morning before that delivery came so that truck showed up and that stuff went back
and he never spent a day in either one of those amazing story amazing man oh here's the other
part that'll make you smile so it's a very sad story except so he had lost really was losing
the ability to write every year on their wedding anniversary but he gets flowers and a handwritten
card from him now that's continued over the past decade so he wrote those he set up with his son
to make sure here's what you need in order to get the flowers for mom make sure that happens she
lives for that day to get that handwritten note from and i will tell you bob was not mr romantic
and he would be the first one to tell you that most romantic thing i've heard about in my life
i always on her anniversary will go hey i'm anxious i'm anxious i'm not even getting anything today
um powerful how the human spirit that resiliency that belief can carry you um and the love of other
people can keep you in a traumatic situation inspired to say i'm going to give this a shot
for one more day and uh yeah he's another one that will always be an inspiration to me
beautiful story i'm so glad i asked now that was incredible yeah thank you that was that i forget
about that sometimes and it's when i think of it it makes me smile absolutely well i think when we
spoke last was when you you'd written the book um so taking the cape off what is great is i think
since then you and i went back and forth with your audiobook um experience because i had to do that
for mine and it was it was like pulling teeth i hated it was just funny because i talk on a
microphone for a living now but when you have to just read this brewing um but there's another
interesting story that starts in ireland talk to me about the documentary yeah this is another uh
no no no such thing as a coincidence so elaine and i used to like like to go on saint patrick's day
we'd always try and find a local pub that had a real band from ireland it's always funny you
you can go in any neighborhood and there'll be five irish pubs and you walk in and and
aerosmith is playing her deep purple on saint patrick's day it's not quite what i was looking
for so um found a place called the irish legend that we used to go to and really enjoy irish music
so um the year she was sick in 2016 we went she was undergoing chemo so we went on saint patrick's
day to a very little quiet pub that we knew that there weren't going to be many people in so we
could have a toast with family and friends because unfortunately we knew i don't think i acknowledged
it that day in my head but i knew this would be the last saint patrick's day i would have her
but we couldn't go back there because there were just too many people and chance of infection so
we missed it the following year in 2017 when it was saint patrick's day um a number of friends
from the firehouse couples we used to go to were like well we're going to the legend and i'm like
not going like what do you mean you're not going i go can't i can't go there without her i just can't
do it they're like well just just try it for a little while she would want you to go i go yeah i
know what she wants i go i don't think it's good for me i don't think i should go 30 minutes give
us 30 minutes and then you can okay fine so i go the great band from from ireland is in there
they're playing and i'm not even conscious i'm just like okay is it 28 minutes yet is it 24
minutes yet is it what am i getting out of here and all i could think about was the times that
we had spent there and how now she wasn't and they took it happened to take a break like 20 minutes
in so i go well okay that's 30 minutes i'm going they're like no no no no no 30 minutes of playing
here he didn't play for 30 minutes and the one gentleman was was the lead singer said when he
took a break he mentioned uh yeah he goes i want to introduce the guys in the band so he introduced
the other four guys and uh said yeah i'm considered the outcast not the true irishman and he had a
broke that was thick as can be and i'm thinking they actually talking about so i went up there
don't know what motivated me to go up there i went up there and i introduced myself and i said i
gotta ask you i said you got this great bro what do you mean you're not an irishman he said
well i was born in new york he said and when i was 10 years old my dad was a construction worker and
he was killed in a construction accident so my mom and myself my two younger brothers she was
from ireland um there was no family really here in the states to lean on a lot of family there so
she brought us back to ireland and we were raised there so there's my bro but you know i'm not
naturally born there and these guys remind me of it all the time kind of a big joke and i said well
my i said my both my parents were born in ireland i said do you ever think about your dad what he
what he's seen you do what you what you missed and i said all the time i hope he's proud and
i hope he's watching so i lost my dad i said he was an irish hurler i said when i was 14 and i go
i wonder all the time too did you see me do this did you see me get married you see your grandkids
uh i said i hope so too well the other guys in the band heard me talk about hurling they didn't
really hear the story and said hi your dad was a hurler oh my good where did he putty play for
blah blah blah blah and the lead singer said yeah he goes he like me he lost his dad when he was 14
well by now i've been up there for like 10 minutes you know i'm supposed to be on this quick break
and one of the wives who was sitting at the table got concerned because she saw these guys around me
and was like oh no he must be telling the story about ireland so she starts to get up to come up
and uh i said yeah i said i used to come here with my wife i said she passed away a couple months ago
and uh they were like oh my goodness and i told them a little bit about the story and i said i'm
sure she's listening and you guys are doing great and uh the the wife comes up now she thinks i've
told them about shawn so she comes up hey guys how you doing uh like oh this great guy we've been
we've never been a story but sad about his loss she said yeah you know horrible to have to bury
your child and they're like what and he looked they looked at me and said you buried your child too and
uh i said yeah now she's mortified because she realizes that you know that's not what we were
talking about so we talk about that now you can imagine if you were sitting in the audience with
your wife like who is this goof is he a groupie up there what's i mean there's a 20 minute break
i came here to listen to them saying and um and they wanted to know more and so i did i told some
of them that what we were doing and that we were going to be going to ireland in march i'm sorry in
may uh to actually spread eileen's ashes and a couple of guys in the band said what date are
you coming we're we're we're going to come greet you guys when you come with your family so
that night when we landed in dublin one of them drove 90 minutes one way to meet us in the pub
and have a cup of coffee and turn around and drive back because he knew how difficult this
trip was the other the other gentleman lived in in uh in dublin so now i stayed in touch with those
guys over the years so fast forward to a year ago april i get a phone call from noel who was one of
the the two gentlemen he was the gentleman who drove 90 minutes that night and he said um hey i'm
thinking about doing something and he great songwriters we had written two children's books
the bus driver so what are you gonna do he said um i'll make a documentary wow um why can't you
imagine you not being successful anything you do but that's a lot of a lot goes into that yeah i've
been taking classes and um something i really want to do and i go that's great i go what are
you going to do it on because i'm going to do it on your book what you're doing on my book
i go how are you going to do that because i'm not sure yet he said but i had a dream i go okay what
was the dream he said your son and your wife came to me in the dream and said you're supposed to do
the documentary on his book well now i can't answer him right i'm like i'm sobbing and i'm like are you
sure and he said i've never been more sure about anything this is what i'm supposed to do so okay
i go you know how it is she told me write the book i go if she told you you better get on it you
better get on it and so over the next few months we put together a program where he was going to
come to the states in fall and interview eileen's friends two of shawn's best friends from high
school people who worked with me to find out what was did they notice the impact of shawn's journey
and eileen's journey on me as a leader and things like that but he said when you come to ireland in
may i want to i want we're going to end up that we do interviews so where we're going to do the
interviews at he said well your dad's house is still remaining and now this is where i'm going
to chronologically jump for a second so this is actually in 2019 in 17 when i had gone over there
to bury your ashes the last day i was there it was with all my cousins and all of them are women
and at the end of this big dinner they're like we have a surprise for you and the gentleman walked
in i go who's that they go it's your cousin so no i don't have any male cousins they go yeah you do
that's on your dad's side never knew this gentleman existed didn't know anything about him and he came
up and gave me a big hug and he said i live on your dad's farm and your dad's house is still
standing you need to come see it and i said i can't i'm gonna leave it tomorrow morning if i ever come
back i will so now we jump to 19 and noel tells me yeah i talked to your cousin we're gonna rig up
so we have electricity and everything in there and we're gonna do your interview sitting in your
dad's living room i'm like what so go to ireland go to his house we pull up in front of it and it's
this old beat up but it's cement cinder block building that's still standing and and i almost
couldn't get out of the car and i got out he said come on i want to take you around the back before
you go in and the cousin took me around the back and there's a big three by three concrete pad
almost like a pool that was set up behind the house and i said okay what's this and he said this is
for to catch the rain water and my grandmother your grandmother would make they would make
cooking and they would wash clothes out of here and i said oh he said put your hands on it so i
did and he said that's the last thing your dad built before he came to ireland i mean before he
came to the states he said he built that with his hands no forms he just took the concrete and molded
all of that so he said keep your hands on there because he goes you're touching his hands and it
was like i had this chill go through me and i'm like okay now you expect me to go in the house
and have an interview are you kidding me they open the door and the fireplace is on and there's a
kiddle hanging in there and there's a chair sitting there with a stool and i'm like and i walked in and
i tears just streamed down my face i'm like oh my god he's here like this is where he grew up this
is where it all started and so noel got me composed and we did did the interview and
it was amazing i walked out of there and then my dad had my grandfather my dad's dad had taken his
life when my dad was 18 he hung himself in the barn and my dad found him and had to cut him down
and i always wondered when i was growing up my dad was very distant never really told me he loved
me i never saw him put his arm around my mom or hold her hand but i knew he loved me and i knew
he loved her and then i realized when i was told this story when i was 35 my mom told me i'm like
no wonder so he got no counseling it was the worst sin you could do in ireland was to take your life
my grandfather was buried in a grave with no headstone his name was removed from the church
book and my dad had to go through that and so he was never going to get close to anybody ever again
even the people that he truly loved and i said to my cousin where's the barn and he said oh come on
with me we went around the back and just beautiful very nice barn and i go no is there another barn
here and he said well yeah the old barn but we don't use it anymore and i go can i go into that
barn he said well sure and we walked around the back and there was this old dilapidated barn where
the roof was only about probably 10 foot high and i pushed the door open and i turned to my right
and you saw all the um um what am i trying to think of um all the timbers everything that made
up the roof structure all of them were only maybe about seven feet off the off the ground
and when i looked to my right it was if i was my dad again and i had a quick mental picture of
somebody hanging there the first fatal call i ever went on was a mom who took her life then i cut her
down and all of a sudden it was like he was with me and it was his dad and like almost like somebody
had loaded a flash drive in my brain and everything that he had been through every emotion and things
he had fought all loaded and i went oh my god i go now i get it dad i get it and i stopped and i froze
and my cousin was like well did you want to go in here for some reason and i said don't you know
he said don't i know what i said well our grandfather i said he took his life right my dad's
dad took his life he goes yeah i go did you know how he did it he went no we were never told and i
went oh my god i go he did it in here and he was like what he had never heard the story and i backed
out of there and i walked out and i remember i was kind of numb and i walked to the car and i got in
it with noel and we drove to the cemetery and did some other shots later and i told noel i go if this
documentary never gets made this is the reason i was supposed to come back here i go because the
circle is now complete i felt my dad in that house i felt his pain in that barn and i realized this
mission i've been on about telling people that mental illness is not a stigma or has a stigma it
is not a character weakness or deficiency and you can't look at it that way my poor grandfather was
ill enough that he took his life and what it did to my dad and now shawn sees my dad in heaven
and then shawn comes to aileen it's the full circle i'm finally whole and i owe you for doing this well
that didn't stop him he came to the states and did all these interviews and put together an amazing
documentary that he finished this past november and now it's out at some film festivals to be
viewed and see and it doesn't really matter about any of that if one person gets something out of it
it'll be amazing and his name is noel joice and if nothing else he completed a circle for me
that i will owe him for the rest of my life because i got my dad back for a little while and it was
it was powerful amazing actually incredible absolutely incredible yeah it's interesting
because i'm writing my second book at the moment and it's about multi-generational trauma and it's
going to start present day and it's going to go back in time and this is just it you know when you
look at the struggles that your father had you know the struggles that then you know that you had
and then sean had i mean if you reverse engineer you know it's not absolute but there's elements
you know and these are dominoes and so by understanding this this part you can start to maybe
push against that domino so it doesn't go to your kids and their kids etc etc so it's so powerful
hearing not only you know the kind of grief journey in the mental health side but even
getting to really understand you know two three generations back yourself and and and literally
live it for a second be there and get that flash and just have that immediate understanding of the
pain that two generations ago really endure i always people will sometimes ask me well you've
got a lot of strong faith so that means that you believe you got a lot of relatives and people love
you on the other side i'm like yeah they go why do you think it was your dad that sean saw why him
in particular once i went to ireland i knew because there was the person who sat there when he almost
lost his life the first time who sat there went i get it john i get the pain i saw the pain so you
need to go back and that's why the next time he didn't have to stay he got to go back there and
no doubt in my mind exactly what you said and that was nulls it's funny i didn't even tell you that
but you got it that was what he figured out about the message was i need to connect this journey
across the ocean of pain and this mental health and how it's progressed and then turn it around
and bring it back home and unite you and your dad this irishman that comes to the states who an
irish american comes back and makes the journey and it really is about that multi-generational
and realize this is a disease that we should have had on our radar just as if i mean i because my
dad died of stomach cancer i've had more colonoscopies than probably anybody in the world and most of the
nurses in illinois know what my butt looks like it hasn't gotten any better with age and but we're
aware of it because we know that there's a chance if only we had known it wouldn't have saved
shawn's life but it would have probably made it more on my radar when he first got sick instead of
me going no that that's just a stage he'll grow out of yeah i mean this is it it's just tools in
the toolbox it's not saying like you said it was an absolute but it's another layer of understanding
you know i think it's it's the same with uh i'll have a lot of conversations with people these days
about anything from addiction to you know being part of a gang whatever it is and we look at it
as which is kind of such an ironic perspective to have a lot of these faiths come from kindness and
compassion and people spend you know whatever day of the week it is and then they come out and then
extremely judgmental and you know unempathetic so the more we understand the layers of these human
elements i would like to think that the more compassion we as a community are going to start
showing people who are struggling whether that's you know again through some sort of crime because
that's all they knew it's all they grew up around or whether it's mental health or addiction or
obesity or whatever it is that you know there's there's a story and i talk about this a lot now
we were all babies once we were all a blank canvas and then life happened and obviously as we said
epigenetics sometimes we carried previous lives as we were first born so the more we understand the
more tools we have to to look at the whole human being the higher the chance we can help people
heal and and thrive in their life and i think too when you when you try to understand where
somebody else has come from you don't do the judgment it almost frees you up a little bit to
do it for yourself because you get it or before when you're if you're too quick to judge that's
when that shame part comes in about yourself going well i should have known better i should
have handled this better i'm the one that should have fixed this why did i do that or that and
now you realize i always and i just one of the things i have told to my niece you're going to
learn to write yourself permission slips and it's okay to write the permission slip that i can't go
to that event or i need to leave early or today's just going to be a bad day because you realize
other people who are in similar situations you certainly would be the first one to hand them that
pad and go i'll just start writing them for you because you need to take care of yourself and you
need to be okay with who you are and love yourself and then it's a whole lot easier to love other
people once you figure it out that you're probably not such a bad soul yeah yeah which circles around
again to first responders advocating for their own wellness you know we do so much for other people
write yourself a permission smith slip that will benefit you and your family absolutely right
beautiful all right well i want to round this off firstly the documentary is there a title and where
can people start looking for it you know hoping that it's going to come to to their area or their
stream well it's called it's called taking the cape off i said so it was easy enough there wasn't a
whole lot of extra creativity that went into it um and right now the the way i understand it is
when it's being viewed by festivals it's not out for public viewing um i know noel has looked at
some other um youtube is probably where it'll go when it when it does come out um and we will
definitely let people know when that's going to occur that could happen in the next month or two
it depends on when it runs this the cycles and i'm not up to speed on i said that's your thing
this is your thing you get credit for i just was the mouth and you did all the work um and but i
but i expect that probably by the middle of next year it'll be available on youtube for people to
see it and i'll certainly let you know when that when that occurs um it's long i think that's
probably one of the challenges of it it's 90 minutes um and so people's attention span is
something that we we worried about in but you just couldn't get it in in any shorter of amount of
time to build both eileen and shawn's legacy and uh people who've seen it the ones who are allowed
to see it are the people who were interviewed on a secure link and many of them watched it with
their significant others who did not know what their involvement was with their husband or wife
and then what my story was in terms of saying it and doing it and they all were like boy that was
powerful so i'm i'm hoping that that's what people will uh will be impacted at least one person if
they walk away going i got a better understanding and i'm going to do a little bit about that to
help myself or somebody else we're good to go well firstly i don't think 90 minutes is that long
the first interview we did was two and a half hours so there we go people loved it so that
so just to appease that fear secondly the book you have obviously the the you know the paper
version the digital version and now the audio book as well where can people find that so you
can find it on amazon uh you can find it on barnes and noble amazon is probably the easiest play
um there's also a direct link on on my web page patrickjkenney.com that you can go to and it'll
take you to it also um people have just been amazing and i the audible book if i go to speak
somewhere and somebody says they're going to order that i always ask them to send me an email
afterwards because i literally as you know you have to listen to like four minutes of it before
it goes audible for them to put on i've never listened to more than the first four minutes
because i listened to it and went oh my god this is terrible um so i always wait to get their
feedback and they've been very kind in what they've sent back so i'm like as long as you
got something coherent out of it i'm good absolutely well you had a lot of great feedback from the
audio book as well i remember so obviously you did a good job yeah thank you yeah it's been
that's been more rewarding than i thought it would be well pat i want to thank you a third
conversation a great conversation again i think if people listen to the original you know chat that
we had and heard the you know the the story of eileen and sean and all the other things that
we discussed adding on this i mean obviously there's a part two as well but this conversation
has been so powerful knowing your story already so i want to thank you again for coming on the
behind the shield podcast and being so generous with your time today always an honor to talk to
my friend always love what you do and have done and continue to do