This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 5.11.
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
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We have Murph coming up in May and again I bought their plate carrier. I ended up buying real
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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 Ayres. This episode is sponsored by Bubbs Naturals, yet another company
that I track down to bring on as a sponsor because I myself love their products. They are offering
you the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast a 20% discount but before we get to that I do want
to highlight a few of the products that I use myself. Firstly collagen. I am about to turn 50
and so my hair, my skin, my nails, not really a big concern when I was younger, definitely a lot more
of a concern now. However where I've really seen the impact is joint health and gut health
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you want to hear more about their products and Glenn's powerful story, listen to episode 558
with co-founder Sean Lake. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast as always my name is James
Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show firefighter and cancer survivor
Kyle O'Neill. Now this was such an important and powerful conversation. Firstly Kyle has lived
experience with his own diagnosis, treatment and horrendous complications that he endured.
But then he took his lessons and his journey and he applied them to helping the rest of his department.
So as you will hear we discuss a host of topics from post-fire decontamination and PFAS,
self-examination, what to do with a cancer diagnosis, the resources at hand, the financial
implication, his push to remove as many barriers to entry as possible and so much more. Now before
we get to this incredible 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 over 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 introduce to you Kyle O'Neill.
Enjoy. Well Kyle I want to start by saying two things. Firstly to say thank you to Mark
Dombroski for connecting the two of us. He's been a wealth of information and brought me to several
of the guests that are on the show already. And secondly to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield
podcast today. James thanks for having me. I really appreciate you bringing me on today and
allowing me to have a conversation with you about some very important topics. Absolutely. Well very
first question. Where on planet earth to be finding you your morning my afternoon? So I live in San
Diego and I work for a large metropolitan department in southern California. Beautiful. And so I would
love to start at the very beginning of your timeline. Obviously we're going to get some
pertinent chapters in your career but tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your
family dynamic. What your parents did, how many siblings? Yeah so born and raised in San Diego
California. Grew up in an area kind of right near the beach, Ocean Beach, Pueblo area of San Diego
which is a you know small beach town community. Let's see my parents were my mom and dad split
when I was five and so then my mom ended up remarrying and that's when I moved down into the
the Ocean Beach area. I actually currently live there. Funny thing is I never thought I'd be able
to own there but life's been good. Family dynamics. I have an older brother two and a half years older
than me, a sister who's five years older than me. We all are really really close. I've had a very
close upbringing. My grandparents brought us all obviously moved here and the only reason we ended
up here is my grandfather was shot in World War II and was treated here in San Diego and years later
talked my grandmother into moving down this way. They're both since gone but my family all my
closest relatives are here in San Diego so just a close family. Grew up I'm a kid of the 80s. Grew
up in the 80s and had a lot of fun growing up. A lot of freedom and just having yeah really good
life growing up and now I'm married. I've been married for 13 years and have two wonderful
daughters that are 11 and 8 and yeah just a really really good life so far. Beautiful.
I would love to go two generations back just for a second. The reason being I just interviewed two
World War II veterans in November live on stage and they I think were 99 and 98 I think the ages
were and so that's a generation that we're losing and you know some of their heroism obviously is
well documented in the books but the real impact of the war the human experience and their homecoming
experience I think has been a little distorted and a lot of kind of fairy tales told the greatest
generation which they were but kind of this projection of they were fine you know and a
lot of times they weren't and you hear this over and over again. What was your experience with your
grandfather? Did he ever discuss the the war itself or did you ever see the impact of the war as you
were you know younger in life? That's a great question. As a young kid I remember my brother
and I both we were really close to my grandfather. I also have three other cousins but they're younger
but what I remember is I remember the scar on my grandfather's hand where he took a bullet
but I never felt comfortable asking him questions about the war. It just felt like a topic that was
kind of off limits to some degree. It felt like you know it just didn't didn't feel appropriate
at the time. It wasn't until both my brother and I got older and my brother more than me
started asking more questions to my grandfather. My grandfather since passed he passed away at
the age of 91. He lived a great life. He was a wonderful man but he did towards his later years
had developed dementia and some things kind of randomly came out during that that time period
of probably about eight to ten years of seeing him kind of decline because of age etc. So what we
know about him is he was a an LCM operator. He talked about one specific thing I really remember
well is he talked about names going up on a board and if you're a landing craft operator
he mentioned you never went in a straight line because he was in the South Pacific and they were
taking the landing craft to the beach and dropping off I assume soldiers and equipment and he said
you never went in a straight line you always zigged and zagged because that's how you could avoid
being hit. But it almost sounded to me the way you described your name your name going up on this
board if you will is you're like you your name would go up and it and then when it came up it
was your turn and you had to be ready to go. Almost kind of like just how else to describe it other
than you know if you're you're like winning an unfortunate lottery if you will like your number
keeps coming up over and over again and I assume at some point you're wondering I hope my number
doesn't come up anymore to have to drive this thing to the beach because you know how many of
those times you're going to make it. I'll also say too he did get wounded I knew that was a thing as
a young kid and you know he never complained he never complained about being a
over there he went in I want to say at the age of 17 he was born in 1925 so kind of when the war
started if you do the math people you know that in that area generally speaking they wanted to go
fight for their country and that was exactly what he did and I want to say he served two or three
years total and then he was released he got I don't think he was a soldier but he was a soldier
and then he was released he got I don't think he went back after he got shot in the hand I don't
think they would allow him back into war but yeah I was I have fond memories of my grandfather and
again it's it's I wish I would ask him more questions but it was one of those things out
of respect to him I I really didn't feel comfortable asking him very specific questions.
Yeah my granddad was the same he was one of the crew in the Auckland Islands which is right up in
Scotland and they shot down the very first German bomber over the UK but same thing he was tight
lipped and I think you know like a lot of a lot of kids kind of start to probe and I think they
get the same kind of reaction because I feel like that generation back then were forced to bury it
down you know and sometimes they were able to process that and it was a healthy process and
they had a long you know healthy life but I think a lot of them suffered the same way that a lot of
our modern day veterans do and it's sad because we romanticize about how well they dealt with it and
a lot of a lot of them didn't and what they saw and had to do I think there's very few people
in uniform that have matched that kind of horror that the World War II era endured.
I I agree wholeheartedly what they must have seen and went through I mean we have I feel like
you know you talk about with PTS you know when there's it's important to do those
critical incidents stress diffusings into briefings because if you bring all the different
components together you're you're able to fill in the gaps of information that if you didn't
your mind would create on its own for example for us here we bring our dispatchers fire EMS police
in the same room to discuss what happened and everybody shares their different story and it
helps build the real story in your own head to help you process it and and likewise with what
we're discussing it's you know that era that generation you know they they didn't have that
they didn't know that so those there's a lot of things there that are probably missing so
and what I was wanted to relate that to is like so with my grandfather not really telling me all
the details because mainly because I didn't ask we go and see a movie Saving Private Ryan or
something like that for example and in my own mind am I creating this this whole thing of what might
have happened with my grandfather but not really knowing exactly all the things he went through
but you're absolutely right and I 100 agree with you that they went through some really bad stuff
and the stories are probably a lot worse than we realize absolutely well what about military and
first responders you had your grandfather anyone else in your family that was in uniform
so my my maternal grandfather was in World War II he was in the navy and then my paternal
grandfather was in the army and was in Korean War obviously different age groups so that's where
that falls in my uncle was also in the army but then from there on out the next generation
did not go down that path in fact I think I'm I'm the only one in my family that I know of that
actually went into firefighting so what about at the school age what were you playing in
as far as athletics and sports yeah so growing up I grew up playing a lot of different sports a
variety everything from football soccer baseball let's see I tried different things I tried
martial arts growing up but by the time I got to high school I really narrowed it down to
football wrestling and track and track and field I did the shot putting discus kind of a bigger guy
wrestling I wrestled heavyweights and then eventually lightweight heavyweights
and then played I was a tackle both offensive defense during high school football played all
all the years I was just busy it kept me busy kept me out of trouble
I guess you could say one thing I would say tell anybody about sports in general
the one sport that taught me the most was wrestling
it was the one thing that I've done in my life where you couldn't blame anybody else for losing
you either win or you don't and when you put in all the work and the effort to to beat the person
they're your opponents coming up you'd either at either a wrestling match that's like a
city match or if you're gonna if we had to wrestle at a competition where we were
going up against multiple people it's it's a lot of people are going to be going up against
multiple people it's it's you you have to take ownership for the loss and so put in the work and
the effort and so that that actually is one of the things I like to tell the young guys is
you know try different things try you know push yourself because it'll make you better and that
that was the one sport that I think really shaped me as an individual and got me ready for the fire
service. You just answered the question I was going to ask because you know the individual sport
versus the team sport it's an interesting dynamic when people have done both. I had the founder of
the Iron Neck and have you ever seen that but it's a neck strengthening tool it's incredible and you
know great application for us in the fire service and martial arts and the stunt world that I've
been a part of as well but he was a wrestler and a football player and I asked him you know how did
how did wrestling or football help you with you know we do a development as an athlete and his
and his answer was wrestling helped him immensely with football he said but football was detrimental
to wrestling did you have the same experience? No not detrimental so the last part it wasn't
detrimental to football football or wrestling definitely helped me for uh so excuse me wrestling
definitely helped me for football and was the reason I got into is I've been I was a lineman
I've been a lineman basically my entire youth playing football and then into high school and one
of the coaches at the end of football season says hey you really should think about wrestling and
they could use a guy a bigger guy like your size so when I started high school I was 215 pounds
was a big kid I kind of grew quick because I'm probably about 225 now so I haven't grown a lot
since but it became a natural fit and the other thing is is I had a long-time childhood friend
who is my brother's age three years older than me who was in the as a wrestler as well and he
encouraged me to do it just because he thought I would be good at it one thing I didn't mention
this is something important about that sport is so I when I wrestled my freshman year I lost every
match I didn't win a single match and I wanted to win and I wanted to learn how to get better
but because of all those losses I kept at it I kept pushing myself and I just got stronger
and I got more hungry to to be better and actually win a match and my sophomore year I remember this
really well I actually did something it's called a Japanese arm throw I threw the guy put him on his
back and I had him he was turning blue that's how hard I was squeezing I'm trying to pin this guy
to the mat so I won my first match and then the rest was history after that I got a taste of what
it was like to win what it took to win how hard I had to work my wrestling coach was a long-time
wrestling coach he was really hard on us but it like you want to talk about shaping character and
and paving a path for people to be successful is you give them the skills and the tools and you
show them what it's like once they get that taste of a victory then then the rest rest is you know
up to you how how far do you want to go did you do play football and wrestle at the same time
I think that was what Mike's comment was that he was so beaten up from football that he was he was
kind of you know a shadow of himself when it came to wrestling practice when he wasn't playing
wasn't playing football at the same time his wrestling was incredibly strong understood yeah
no so for us here in the west coast football and wrestling are different seasons so wrestling is a
winter sport one thing I do I do remember too is I wanted to play baseball but I wasn't allowed to
because if you wanted to play baseball you had to play winter ball to be able to play spring ball
and I wasn't I got into wrestling and so no I wasn't beat up you know I would always come out
of wrestling football season heavy for some reason I guess I just didn't get quite as much exercise
or burn quite as many calories so it always kind of started as a higher weight class and then
eventually with wrestling because the work was so hard I mean you're probably familiar with monkey
rolls we would do monkey rolls which are like a figure eight of three you have three people
to one laying down in the middle two on each side and you're just jumping over each other and
rolling and doing push-ups and basically you're doing that for 15 minutes in a hot you know heated
room and amongst all the other stuff we would do you couldn't we couldn't keep the weight on so I
I would always go from heavyweight to light heavyweight at some point in the season and
so no I wasn't beat up from from football I was I would I that would be tough having to do both
would be a definitely a big challenge what did you notice mentally when you got that first win
because it's funny I talked about this a few times on here I did taekwondo not quite the the impact
of football or wrestling but I went into a tournament I went up against a friend of mine
I'm all tippy-tappy smiley like we are in in the class and he fucking destroyed me and so from then
on it was something switched and I shifted my training I'd be up in I live on a farm so I'd be
up in the the bedroom I had a heavy bag hanging from the ceiling through the attic space and I
would just drill for hours and hours and hours and I started winning and winning and winning and
winning and I'd never had that kind of you know for lack of a better word killer instinct until
someone would kick my ass was that kind of similar for you was it was was there a certain point where
you turned that corner and you found a different part of yourself yeah just something inside I
I just remember I've always been kind of a nice soft-spoken kid growing up um tough I felt like I
was a tough kid growing up and I grew up you know I was one of those kids that left the house in the
morning on the weekend and came home when it was dark and there were no cell phones and parents
kind of knew we were somewhere safe and they knew we would be home and we kind of fended for ourselves
for different things and I experienced things along the way but I think there was a moment where I
just got tired of losing and I just told myself that I some something something inside of me
became like you know just like straight out of rocky or something like you dig down super deep
to a place that you didn't know existed and then what comes of that is a bigger better version of
yourself that and I just just built this toughness and one thing I will tell you you talked about one
one sport affecting another I decided to start boxing after high school and I had to unlearn
the wrestling stance because in boxing you have to narrow your your plane so that you don't get hit
right so you're you're going from this square stance to like a profiled stance at an angle and
so that was that was one area that impacted me later on but still to this day I think it's
one of the greatest sports if there's the team aspect to it when you're when you're wrestling
team competitions and but then there's the the personal aspect and the you know similar to boxing
can you can't blame anybody if you lose it's it's it's on you 100 if you're going to win that match
or not absolutely well from the career aspect then you didn't have anyone in your immediate family
that was in the first responder profession were you dreaming of the fire service when you were in
school or was there something else in mind yeah so what happened was is my senior year in high school
we were required to do what's called a senior portfolio upon exit from high school and
essentially what this was was a three members from the public come in and they were kind of all walks
of life if you will and you had one of those like foam boards and would put up your four years of
what you did in high school and and then talk about not only what we did but then what we were going
to do after high school and it just so happens that there was a division chief from a local fire
department in that group and after everything was done he pulled me aside and says hey how would you
like to come do a ride along at my fire department I sure I took him up on it and that was my first
exposure to the fire service and and he you know I started to learn a little bit everything I learned
as I went really really made me like it because I was one of those people that really had that
mindset of I don't really want to be behind a desk but this this I could do so that's kind of where
it all started for me initially was that that experience and then that offer and just taking a
leap of faith was that department you're with now was it another department went to first
it was a different department I didn't end up working for them but what stemmed off of that was
uh I had a neighbor the street that I grew up on this old guy that used to walk up and down the
block and I would see him every just about every afternoon he says hey you know Kyle there's this
old fire captain up the street you gotta go talk to him you know uh he he knows his stuff and he
might be able to help you out and again one day I got the courage to go up there and ring his doorbell
which was a pull station funny funny enough here the actual pull station and uh little did I know
he was actually one of the most well-respected uh captains on my department they have a building
named after him um and he got me pointed in the right direction with the fire cadet program here
and I got involved with that was in that for um from 18 to 21 and then with my my current department
um there was a few things that run concurrently with that but essentially um for three years that
my life I ate slept and breathed fire department and then eventually got picked up with the current
my current department at the age of 21. So this is an interesting topic that's coming up a lot
recently because of the nationwide recruitment crisis and I don't think you know we're in we're
in the landscape now where people are scrambling they just put bums on seats in a lot of departments
and it breaks my heart because I don't think our younger firefighters know what hiring looked like
when you and I first came on so I got hired in 2004 and I was testing certainly and when I went
back to west to anaheim I was testing against like a thousand plus candidates all with resumes that
were stacked so you just mentioned a three-year gap where you're in a cadet program which by the
way I love mentorship programs in fire service I think it's the answer to so many of our issues
talk to me about the difficulties getting hired when you you first try to get in uniform.
Oh very competitive I was also hired in 2004.
Jeez it was thousands of people were taking the the initial test to get through the general
aptitude component of the testing and all that and I just remember being in this in the groups
with those people and just seeing how many people again I was really young I was 21 when I when I
finally got the job but super competitive but it was like kind of we always we always talked about
how it was competitive but like a friendly competitiveness you know we all work together
and and some of those same people that again being friendly competitive with later got hired
to the same department and so we all we all kind of made it in our own way but it wasn't wasn't
easy and the department I currently work for it is it was highly sought after department so
it drew a lot of attention I I'm throwing a random number out but I want to I think somewhere in the
neighborhood of seven to eight thousand people took the test and then you know kind of dwindles
down to you know maybe they only hire a hundred off of that list over the course of three academies
you know 30 some odd people per academy and something to that nature is the intent but it's
it's super super competitive and yeah like you mentioned there's been a shift it's it's not the
same doesn't have the same flavor anymore it concerns me in a lot of ways that we're not
attracting the right people for the right reasons but there's also the component that we need to
we need to take better care of our firefighters from a higher level ensuring you know adequate
pay and you know I don't know why any of the benefits would be going away in any way shape
or form especially things that we used to have like lifetime medical and with so many firefighters
you know getting having some long-term health consequences you know those things would be
really important and probably draw more people in and we also just need to focus our energies on
health and safety of members and then put our efforts there that could be a recruitment tool
in and of itself is like our department has a robust health and safety operation so taking
care of our members we need to make sure that they're the highest priority and one thing I'll
speak to is I wrote a grant some years back and was fortunate to get the award for that grant
it's 47 PPE washing extractors and I finished that that grant writing with the most important
resource in the fire service is not the fire engine but the fire personnel and what my I'm
I still stand behind that it's our membership they matter the most it's the people we got to
put all our time and effort into making sure that they're properly taken care of and one of the
things I'll finish with here is that my my boss taught me one thing really important he says we've
always been so concerned about our members making it home safely and in the health and safety arena
the perspective kind of shifts towards making sure that our members come back to work safely
and healthy and in one piece because our home lives there's things that go on everybody's got
stuff things that don't go right at home and the things that they say well back in the day they
would just say well just leave it at the door and nothing that happened at home should come into
work well unfortunately it does and that's the reality so we have to have things in place that
help our members that essentially that that help them take care of themselves give them the
resources that they need ensure that they're well taken care of through all kinds of different
things and I don't want to go into all of them but we we can do better and we have to because
the fire service has changed we're not running um the call volume has just gone through the roof
and we're not expanding our departments fast enough to to keep up with this demand of the of
the public whereas there's much more public a 911 abuse than I can recall from my earlier years in
my in my career um there's and they and they as you mentioned recruitment we didn't need recruitment
when I came on the department that's it that that whole thing blew me away when that started because
it spoke for itself and there was people just chomping at the bit to get hired on the fire
service and now we're we're in a different completely different phase and it's a different
generation too there's some of the generational things that I think we could do better at is just
kind of learning how we can best communicate with the newer generation etc so I'll kind of pause there
no no I think these are such important conversation it's great when I have someone that's you know
kind of my generation some of the guests have been on a lot longer than I have but
it kind of shines a light on what it was like for us and how competitive it was and I agree a thousand
percent studying with other firefighters trying to get one of those positions not stepping on each
other or stabbing each other in the back but just you know helping each other trying to training
together all those things but what my perspective in is interesting because you said a phrase that
we always talk about make sure they go home the next day we never say make sure they go home more
often and we look at what's going on at home one of the big reasons why we have issues at home is
that we don't get to go home very much and so correct me if I'm wrong you guys are 56 hour
work week do you have a kelly or no kelly 56 yeah so so yeah so 56 so there we go so when you and
I were hiring bright-eyed and bushy tail no one was talking about seat deprivation mental health
you know hardly anyone was talking about cancer in the fire service no one was talking about
you know divorce and you know uh overdose and addiction and all the things and that's not
the entire fire service but it's the part that they kind of kept on the shelf out the way from
everyone and so we could just be rah rah rah you know getting the job and love it and we did
generationally we always talk about you know these newer guys kind of you know in a kind of looking
down lens I think what's happened is that there's been an awakening because this young generation
now has so much information at their fingertips they can look at the fire service that you and
I never could because they can see the whole picture and now when they see 56 hour weeks and
they see mandatory overtime and they see all these other things that they factor into the equation
of a job to be proud of and service and camaraderie and all the good things they look at the whole
puzzle and go this doesn't sound as good as everyone was saying this doesn't look to me like I
I only work 10 days a month this looks like I work one and a half times more than every civilian I
know actually when you do the math so this is one of the things I think that we're it's exciting
because we're a paradigm shift now the world has realized or the US at least has realized
all the things that are contributing to killing our firefighters and we're going to get to obviously
other factors so we have the most beautiful opportunity to fix it because either a we go
down to minimal recruiting where we have to basically take everyone which includes the good
ones and the bad ones or be in some departments we might not have a department anymore we might
not have firefighters anymore so I look at it optimistically like we've turned a corner where
we have the option to really go back to the old day where people are queuing up lining up to become
a firefighter if the department has the courage to actually advocate for their people put you know
workplace health initiatives in which includes more rest and recovery between shifts because
of the high up tempo of a firefighter in 2024 and therefore we solve that and we make a huge dent in
all the issues that we see so that's kind of my perspective I agree wholeheartedly that
is a really good summary of the way of explaining that yeah it really there has been an awakening
and I think you're right and the technology is a huge huge part of that I think when we started
realizing these things were problems too is that we just opened up pandora's you know this pandora's
box if you will of information like I remember so I'll get into it here if it's okay I just talk a
little bit about being a cancer survivor and please let's go yeah yeah so you know I'm really
proud of being a firefighter I actually became a firefighter in 2003 and I was a reserve for a local
Indian reservation Native American reservation fire department and first shift in a fire station
believe it or not I go in two hours into my shift I get called out to the apparatus bay and
you're going to go on a strike team and didn't know this but it led to nine days being deployed
first to the Grand Prix fire in San Bernardino and then four days into it we we were demobilized
and sent back to the cedar fire here in San Diego and it what I what I think about in retrospect of
that whole time was how much experience I gained in a really short amount of time that and now
how much exposure I had in a really short amount of time and how we fought those types of wild
and urban interface fires it wasn't fought in structure gear and we didn't think about using
our SCBAs yeah so many things cycled through my head and it's kind of a just you opened up a random
thought there but if you start if I think if all of us were really to sit down as firefighters and
start thinking about how many times we've been exposed throughout our career if you've been on
any amount of time you're going to start to realize really quickly that you've been exposed a lot
it's not and I know we've talked previously and it's not just the the the fire ground exposures
that's the problem it's the culture it's the sleep deprivation it's this whole huge mixture of of
things that are are leading to adverse health effects in our firefighters so uh yeah so I got
diagnosed back in 2016 with a mid-grade form of cancer spent a year and a half on the sidelines
in part due to the treatment from the cancer the cancer treatment and actually I had quite a few
complications unfortunately that not everybody would have but certainly infections and pulmonary
embolisms and things kind of set me back and kept me out longer than I needed to be and I feel very
fortunate that I made it back but that kind of was a turning point for me in my life because I
was so frustrated because I felt I kind of felt cheated I felt like I had given so much of my
of my life to the fire service and as I mentioned being very proud of being a firefighter but also
working at busy companies putting myself in harm's way more than if I went to a slower station and
and just kind of kicked my feet up but I definitely like going back in my mind and thinking of all the
times where I made mistakes and I could have done better and I and now that fire service is no longer
in my mind that that fire service shouldn't exist anymore but unfortunately because of the cultural
barriers that we face in today's fire service we have we still have all these problems and we have
policies and we have SOGs and we've done infrastructure changes but we haven't fixed the
crux of the problem which I think ultimately comes down to better leadership and the the people that
they can make those changes they can be firm in their stance on things have to do those things
in order to protect the people underneath them so I might have wandered a little bit on that question
no no no this is the space for wandering wander away um it's interesting when you were talking
I had a concept I never thought about before and it's you know it would be it would have to take a
little um open-mindedness but if say that there was no fire service and you had to create one from
scratch here in 2024 would we do the things that we do at the moment and the answer is no because
you would look at for example health and safety standards from companies that deal with hazardous
materials and bio hazards so the way that you looked at decon and PPE would be completely
different the way that you looked at rest and recovery and shifts would be completely different
but I feel just as you said earlier that there was absolutely an application when we were literally
sitting around a firehouse playing you know cards stroking the dalmatian and waiting for a fire
period but what we have now jack of all trades master of none you know ems fire rope rescue
confined space you name it snake retrieval I've done I've done some of that too um you know we
we really are just spread so thin and that's okay if the environment the health and safety side the
PPE the advances in technology had gone along with it but the that mentality has stayed back
in the 1950s but as you pointed out 70 years later what we do is completely unrecognizable
to our forefathers a couple of generations before right and we I think to factor into that as well
is you know just look at the example of of legacy fuel fires versus modern fuel fires I mean those
these aren't the same fires anymore and you if you I've talked to the old guys the old guys will
say the same thing they these these the fire behavior is different the fire department's
different a lot of things are changing I mean look at look at the more current um topics lithium ion
right hot topic I'm sure still for a lot of departments cancer prevention's hot topic
behavioral health all these things that if you had to start a new fire department right now
you would have to start with that and how much more time would you spend on those topics
as compared to you know endless days out on the grinder pulling hose and and you know
these are the things that could kill you too when you look back now you had what 12 years
on when you first got diagnosed have I got that right I can think back my first department was
Hialeah Miami and then I went to Anaheim for a few years in California and I can remember the
complacency when it came to dumpster fires when it came to overhauling car fires you know and
then I went into to Anaheim they got a lot better even overhaul but you know there was always and
it's understandable you know the stuff we wear is hot it's heavy you want to get it off as soon
as you can so I saw that kind of slow movement towards getting better but you know the beginning
of your career the beginning of my career I'm sure there were a lot of micro exposures so with that
being said though were there any larger incidents that you look back and think maybe gave you a kind
of macro exposure during that particular fire absolutely so the one I mentioned earlier the
nine-day strike team for the Cedar fire in 2007 had a another nine-day strike team here locally
it was the Witch Creek fire again this is just my my the way I like to think of the wildland
urban interface is just you're fighting a structure fire in the wrong equipment and I've heard
different things like oh well you should have been in structure gear well it's not realistic
you're not going to spend nine days in structure gear and there's not enough SCBA bottles that
you would breathe down every SCBA bottle in the department and our light and airs would never stop
running if we were to operate that way so there's those exposures were macro in my mind a few other
ones would be just really big you know commercial structure fires we've had quite I've had quite a
few over the course of my career and then some of the ones where we actually were able to figure out
what was burning and thinking about how bad that probably was I remember one of them that I was on
there was a fairly large amount of hydrogen cyanide it was a color smoke I'd never seen before at a
structure fire you know if you if you know anything about reading smoke it stems from
it stems from the ISO incident safety officer course and we talk about a lot about different
colors of smoke but we also don't really think too much about the off-color yellows or browns
that happen occasionally when there's really bad toxic stuff burning so that that one kind of stands
out in my mind as a another bad one so they they happen and like you said though there's probably
a lot more of the micro exposures over the course of the career and kind of that whole
mindset of like you know rocks in the backpack or drops in the bucket and and you know you fill it
up the more the more you fill it up the worse your chances of getting a you know a diagnosis for cancer
is or if it's on the behavioral side it's more a likeliness of having some kind of a behavioral
issue but all those things happen and the fact that we're we're doing a better job of equipping
today's fire service with that it's a step in the right direction we still have a long way to go
what about the road into realizing that something is wrong with you kind of walk me through how you
discovered that and then you touched on you know the the the side effects of some of the issues
you know what were the treatments that were presented to you and what were the treatments
presented to you and and how did they affect you positively and negatively okay um so i
felt tired more than usual right before i got diagnosed i was having these
this really i was really fatigued there were some home life things going on
i had a special needs daughter at home who was going to require treatment in another state
and i was working every day i could possibly to pay for that expense because i was essentially
going to have to pay two mortgages uh flights every all these other uh extra expenses that were
to be able to give my daughter to eradicate her to seizures and or find a solution for the seizures
if you will and so i had a lot of stress um i was a fairly new engineer um i would like i said i was
burning the candle at both ends working a lot trying to get all these days covered and you know
the fire service trying to just trying to get it set up and so i just remember just not feeling
real well and i couldn't quite pinpoint what was going on but i did decide i would go to the er
and get checked out and i did have a um a growth and i remember um i had to find child care coverage
i went to the er thought i was going to be there um for a couple hours maybe once they saw me and
um for a couple hours maybe once they saw me and then they would release me and all that whole
mindset and i remember going in and you know when you're in the triage with the nurses
i remember their eyes were big and i when they told me to go have a seat i turned around walked
away and i never hit the seat they called me back right away um they ran a bunch of different tests
which included blood and urine and eventually led to an ultrasound uh and then ct scans and
kind of left leaving there and when i share my my story with people i remember
probably one of the harder things to do is calling my wife and i i made up my mind when i walked out
i'm like i'm not going home and dropping this on her i'm going to call her and let her know
what was going on and so but thankfully very supportive um and you know kind of started
me on that journey if you will excuse me um so fast forward a little bit um there's a whole
lot of details in between but i ended up having to start um i had a surgery to start to remove
the cancer the big tumor and then that uh i moved into having to go through chemotherapy for
um which ended up being i'm going to say um almost three months just about three months
and as as you mentioned you asked about the complications so i was most of the way through
chemotherapy and i was at home and at this point my white blood cell count was really low
um had lost all my hair was had lost a lot of weight because of the effects of chemotherapy
um and then i remember i was sitting in like a lazy boy chair in my living room and um i wasn't
doing a whole lot i was just really because i was really tired and i remember going to get up out
of the chair and i remember feeling this really sharp excruciating pain in my like right um my
right rib cage area and it was so bad it dropped me to the ground and i was having trouble breathing
and what i ended up you know coming out obviously later on figured out that i ended up having
pulmonary embolisms which is a side effect of both cancer and chemotherapy because both are
considered uh they both put your body in a hyper coagulated state so if you're not moving enough
and it's one of the things i tell guys that are going through cancer treatment is make sure you're
moving don't stop have a regimen walk your block do something but don't don't just sit in one place
because then you know that that can cause issues so uh that happened and um it was it was chemo's
bad enough uh you talk to anybody who goes through it and they probably have a very similar
experience and some are worse than others but now i had to do these injections these lovinox
injections which are these preloads um and they're fine at first you're basically stabbing yourself
with like a i don't know 12 gauge needle or 10 gauges it's a big needle and you had to we had
to do it twice i had to do it twice a day morning and night and so i had had literally divided my
anatomy at my right side of my belly was the morning and my left side was the pm but after
a while that the part that you kind of have to like really psychologically psych yourself out for
is it's like meat tenderizer like my whole belly was bruised and i was like i was like
my whole belly was bruised black and blue because i'd stabbed myself so many times for these
injections that you're starting to have to stab yourself in these already bruised areas so it's
it's not it's not fun uh and then on top of that chemo just makes you feel like garbage you know
and the way i tell people chemo is like the worst hangover you've ever had in your life
and it never goes away and and you're you're wearing it for 24 hours a day seven days a week
and even it doesn't subside until many weeks if not months after you you finish off the regimen
um so i had that complication um i got through chemo okay but i kind of fell into this gray area
of um you know what do i do from here well i had my cancer had had gotten into my lymph nodes
and the chemo didn't shrink them enough so the next course of action and i had multiple doctors
weigh in on an oncologist surgeon and and they said you need to have this big surgery so
i had what's called an rpl and d retroperitoneal lymph node dissection where they go in they
basically open you up um i had 44 staples in my stomach when i was done so it's a big surgery
um i think it took about seven hours um but they open you up and they go in and they they take what
they need um they ended up taking six lymph nodes out and when they do and they take those lymph
nodes out they put these clips on these surgical clips and that'll come in here in just a little bit
um so i i remember waking up i got through the surgery you know i survived it and uh spent about
five days in the hospital um and got home and it's pretty humbling as as a firefighter who's never
been transported in an ambulance only only just you know with my job and taking people to the
hospital etc having to get transported for the embolisms and then going home to uh uh a hospital
bed because i had to sit sleeping up and i had to have a pull bar because i didn't they had cut
through my core and i had to have a commode in the bathroom because i couldn't physically
get all the way down to the toilet um you know things that you don't think of at the age of 33
that you're going to need and in order to recover um but i had them and they were there and they were
again it was humbling um so then uh not not far after that not long after that i ended up having
an infection that i had a gastro or a yeah an infection in my in my stomach i had contracted
uh this is gross but cdiff and ecoli in the hospital from being in a room i think with another person
and things weren't as clean and i wasn't able to do as much as i would like to have been my hygiene
better at the time um and and one of the things i tell in my story is this that if so those i was
i stopped doing the lovinox injections prior to surgery for obvious reasons right that's that's a
blood thinner and i had to stop it so that was my stomach was still really badly bruised and i had
this huge abdominal scar and at the time when i got sick i remember i was so violently i was so
violently ill i was just trying to get out of bed and to not tear my staples i had to do like a very
specific like way i rolled off my bed onto my feet kind of thing and it wasn't wasn't easy but i get
out of bed and i make two steps out my door headed to the bathroom and i just vomit everywhere and
that all that if you can picture your stomach muscles when you're vomiting it's like it's
giving you it's doing everything it can and having 44 staples in your stomach and that pain i thought
i tore my stitches i thought i tore my staples in this process and so when i landed back in
the hospital again transported from my house they treated me for the infection and i was in a lot
of pain from all of it and then i i did get through that piece of it and there were some things noted
because they ct they did another ct scan on me and noted that there was this like mass starting to
grow on my stomach from the fluid from one of the clips leaking from the surgery and what ended up
coming of that is that the the leak what's called olymphocel it started to create this like
little baby in my my my abdominal cavity and started walling itself off and it was lymphatic
fluid just leaking out well that eventually pushed on my inferior vena cava it caused a
second round of pulmonary embolisms which i wore about a month later so then i had to go through
i had to they had to intervene because that obviously is causing me problems so i got treated
for the embolisms again ambulance back to the hospital treated for three days and then released
with lovinox now i'm doing the injections again and then sort of towards the end of my my my whole
story of treatment i had they had intervened through interventional radiology where they
basically use a live ct to go in and find that problem and put a needle in there and then
they would they had this needle running through my back and this tube coming out into a 500 cc bag
that i had to carry around with me all the time initially that bag was filling full of lymphatic
fluid twice a day i was draining a thousand ccs of lymphatic fluid and then it started to to slow
down well sadly it failed on me and then i had to wait another month for it to fill back up for them
to do the same procedure again and then they got it in and i got an infection in that and then that
like five different bad things ended up down that tube and into this deep space in my abdominal area
and that landed me in the hospital for seven days with some really a really heavy concoction of
you know antibiotics to to get me through and kill off what had all landed in there
and they didn't know what was wrong with me at the time because i was kind of a little i was a
little bit hallucinating from being just so sick just really the sickest i've ever been
and i ended up they stroke coded me initially because they thought i might be having a stroke
then they spinal topped me the next day so i was just like a pin cushion through this whole thing
and i say all that that's though i mean that that kind of ends the year of treatment and then i
spent six months on light duty just recovering and trying to get my strength back so i could come
back to the job you know i say all that it's really you know a bad experience there's people
that have been through a lot worse than me people that have been through less but that was my story
and it was suffering if if when i tell people what was it you you think you know what pain is
you don't unless you've been through something like that you've never suffered before because
you've never got you don't get a break you're just in pain all the time you feel like crap the whole
time you don't you know you can't eat anything you eat is it doesn't taste right because of the chemo
drugs everything tastes like metal because of the metal chemotherapy based treatments
but it but honestly and here here's the here's the here's a light at the end of the tunnel with all
that the light at the end of the tunnel is i think for me personally i didn't realize that
is i think for me personally i didn't realize how good life was like how much i take for granted
all the time the just waking up every day and getting to eat and having a roof over your head
and getting to go do things and people just they miss out on such the such important things in life
the simple things in life that are just amazing and it's every day if you just would pay attention
to these small things that happen if you have kids if your kids come up and give you a hug your day
is amazing if you were able to eat and not have any you know any problems from the food and if you
have the ability to go to work and make money you you're lucky you just don't know how lucky you
really are put yourself in somebody's shoes who who doesn't have that or is going through a really
really unfortunate time in their life where they're sick and so i find myself one being proud to be a
cancer survivor but two sad for the people that don't survive and have to endure all that pain
only only for it to lead to death so i became and i'll pause here and i want to ask more questions
but that's why i became so passionate about cancer prevention and finding solutions to fix these
problems is because nobody should ever have to go through that that was the worst possible thing
i've ever been through in my life i couldn't imagine it being any worse than it really was but
again thankful for surviving the doctors the amazing friends and family and co-workers that
supported me along the way like it's just it's like overwhelming when you really think about the fact
that you get a second chance what are you going to do with that second chance and i decided to fix
these problems that i know are problems and i knew i could do that if i just applied myself and use
my passion and my motivation so again as you can see that that it is really near and dear to me
that we fix these issues well firstly i mean i think it was so needed to hear all of the horrible
things that happen because it really then reframes the reality of what a diagnosis would be if you
don't you know then end up dying as well but um i just want to go back for one second was it am
i understanding right was it testicular cancer initially yes okay and did you ever do any kind
of self-examination is that where you found the lump because i mean obviously there there is a way
if we are fortunate enough and be you know overly familiar with our balls to actually notice that
you know that can go from a somewhat easy you know removal and treatment all the way through
to the nightmare that you're in jord yes yes and it you know obviously there's different things
at play there's different types of germ cell tumors that you could get if you got testicular cancer
uh and it's one area that actually we'll touch on for a second is this women are taught at really
young ages to do self-breast exam and you know i have two daughters so i want them to know that
information and they should be doing that right young boys aren't taught that and it's it's such
a disservice that you know i know it's it's a touchy topic or whatever but when you start
you know i start bringing these things up in the fire station you know like the guys that are
approaching 40 like hey you you're gonna have to go through a prostate exam and it's really not that
bad if you really i mean it's uncomfortable nobody likes to do it but you shouldn't avoid it and if
they give you an option out of it tell them no you want it because the the worst of the two is
you get it and um you don't treat it right away like you said i mean with the self-exams are so
important and that's an education component that i think is equally important as having the right
screening set up for your department because from my experience about half of the people that have
come in through my office that have been diagnosed with cancer have taught have caught their own
cancer through self-examination self-examination um but yeah yeah that's that's it mine actually
just been transparent here is my uh testicle was three times its normal size and it grew that fast
and in just a few days crazy what about the self-talk i want to get to obviously what happened
next and all the initiatives that you're working on now but i've had a few guests on here that have
just been through absolute hell and there were times where they just wanted it to end and you
know contemplated just finishing it what was that self-talk that kept you going through this this
nightmare for an entire year i remember when i first started and i just i just put on my
warrior face um i knew i had to go through this uh chemo class before i started chemo and i remember
uh the doctor looking at me and saying are you ready and i said yeah i'm ready i mean what other
choice do i have i have to do this or i'm dead so it's it's pretty straightforward for me
um i was really strong initially and i like to think i'm a tough tough guy but after
enough of the treatment it really really uh pushed me to a place that i've never been before
and i'll cycle back to uh the wrestling comment earlier i think there is a a level of
mental toughness that i've had from childhood and from firefighting and from wrestling and things
that i've done and i think that that along with having uh being having two little girls at home
at the time three and six months were my two daughters and you know my wife and all these
things that are one that i have to live for right um those are the things that carried me through
probably the hardest parts of that and i don't know i just i didn't have a choice i just had to
deal with it i had to tough it out i had to get through it um uh taking my own life was not an
option it's never been an option i don't care how bad life gets for me it's no it's not an option
it's just not not me i'll suffer the worst suffering um if it kills me then it kills me but
killing myself would not be an option for me i just had the uh former head of psychology for
the navy seals eric part around and it was interesting because he himself was shifting
away from the word trauma and um using the word struggles instead and the the observation he'd
made because i was talking about you know when we have things happen early in life if we are able
to process them work through and whatever it is i truly believe that becomes a superpower so it's
that post-traumatic growth it's that hope of in the mental health story that we really don't hear
very much it's very kind of you know sad violin at the moment um and he said he made a comment
basically that almost none you know he struggled to believe that that any candidate could come
into buds having never really endured struggles in their life and be successful in that selection
process and so when we hear now about your resilience and the ability to maintain a healthy
thought because it means suicide basically is suicide ideation comes when that brain is
breaking down whether that you know that miswiring begins so through all that suffering
i would argue that you know some things that happen when you're younger and i'm sure the
separation of your parents and the wrestling and other areas created that um repetition of
overcoming struggle that then factored later in life when you were fighting for your own life
absolutely yep i do i do agree with that it it it's it factors into that and so many other things
um i just it it's hard to explain but it was one of those things that probably the hardest
points in my treatment when i was the sickest i was just curled up into a ball on my bed
i couldn't move it hurt to move um there weren't enough pain medicines in the world that would
would treat the pain that i was in um and the as i mentioned going to the hospital um my wife uh
recapped this for me recently actually uh when i went in for the the first round of pulmonary
embolisms um and i don't know where the pains generated in that in that type of scenario but
they dumped everything on me they cut me off because i'd had too much and my respiratory
drive is starting to slow down but uh that's a whole another animal right there you know we
treat we're treating i got treated with a morphine on the on the road trip over there in the ambulance
then uh delotted at the hospital then eventually fentanyl which was short-lived um and when the
pain's that bad and you can't you can't touch it you just have to wear it and you know i never
never heard that comment about the navy seals talking about struggles but it makes sense you
know and i think um some people wear those struggles easier than others others don't and
that's okay i think everybody's individual but my whole life literally prepared me to endure that
moment uh at 33 years old um i think just being a firefighter a bruiser of a kid and uh it yeah and
i got me through it just glad i'm i'm glad i'm done with it and then ackham wood doesn't ever happen
again uh yeah certainly agree with you that there's life life trains us for upcoming events for sure
while we're on the conversation of pharmaceuticals you mentioned about your daughter
and her seizures i had a woman on about a year ago now page figgy and her daughter was charlotte and
if you ever look into the kind of cbd conversation there's a story charlotte's web um and that is
charlotte page's daughter and she was born she was a twin born and then very early on they noticed
she was different developmentally and she started having seizures and the seizures got more and more
acute to the point where i think she was about a year and a half old um she was seizing for 29
minutes having a one minute post-exile period and then seizing for 29 minutes again so we're talking
about you know hospice palliative care by this point and she had tried all the latest supposed
wonder drugs and all the you know the pharmaceutical side and she went the other way to cbd and
literally found a a company that would formulate um a hemp kind of cocktail for her and they put
it in her stomach tube and immediately the seizures started diminishing and page went from hospice
through living nine more years and then ultimately she passed away from febrile seizures from covid
about two or three years ago now but you know massively extended the lifespan and she was a
healthy little girl up to that point so um what has been your experiences with that because i've
had patients you know numerous times as a paramedic that have been on all kinds of meds and they just
didn't just didn't work they didn't change anything but they turned them into a zombie when they
weren't seizing um what have been your experience with that i mean is there anything that you found
on the pharmaceutical side or have you looked on the plant medicine side well ultimately ended up
being is the uh the pharmaceutical medicine is what has been successful in treating my daughter's
seizures uh so my daughter um has a rare disease called sturgweber syndrome um it's kind of a three
things that are the makeup of that syndrome um they're born with a port wine birthmark um usually
on their face usually the ones that are affected the most is when it covers the eye um or in the
upper portion of the cheek and the more the more there is and basically what that the birthmark is
replicated on the back of the brain on the opposite side and it's it's like a calcification in the
brain the same associated eye that's affected by the port wine birthmark also has um i'm drawing
a blank right now um uh usually there's there's eye pressure issue and i'll think of the name here
in a second um glaucoma glaucoma thank you glaucoma and then the birthmark so those are the kind of
three the three things that that are there so as i mentioned i was trying to get my daughter
um working all this time to take my daughter out um to a specialist out of maryland um and it would
end up being the first trial study for what is now uh the first fda approved version of cbd
now what i can tell you is it didn't work for her um it wasn't a one-size-fits-all so
uh one thing i do remember from early on is she was on like kepra and some like lower level um
forms of um you know anti-seizure medicine one of them was like an alcohol base which is really
common i'm and i couldn't think of the name of it right now but um we had to get her off that
you know that wasn't going to be good for a long term uh this is i said the cbd didn't work but we
we pulled out all the stops and we got invested into he's the last she was the last candidate to
get involved or participant to be involved in this uh this trial study um and as we were trying to
titrate her off of her normal meds with the cbd oil her seizures picked up and got worse um you
know emergency medicine we treated her with the diazepam the rectal valium several times throughout
she started seizing seizing when she was six weeks old um and they were more focal seizures not not
full body but um again we we kept kept with it with the neurologist and finding different uh
trying different anti-seizure medicines and now we have what we have her on you know definitely
knock on wood has been working with her for very well she hasn't had a seizure in quite some time
but it's not like people ask me all the time hey you know will she be able to drive someday or
will these averages go away and the answer unfortunately is no because it's part of the
syndrome with the calcification in the brain and the neurological dysfunction in the brain it's
not correctable um completely but it's live you can live with it for a long time and um you can
also be seizure free for a really long time so sad to hear about charlotte passing away and i do
remember her story very well i watched a documentary on that um and i think it's magical for a lot of
kids and a lot of people it just isn't it's there's no it's not the miracle drug for everybody
in my opinion yeah no and that's what page says as well i mean it's just knowing i think it's even
with the mental health conversation in nutrition conversation strength and conditioning conversation
is understanding what tools are in the toolbox and if plant medicine has been vilified for so
many years it may work better than other things for some people and as you said it might be the
pharmacy when i don't demonize drugs you know some drugs have a powerful application even the ones
in our drug boxes medics i mean they're miracle drugs in my opinion some of those but you know
it's understanding that if we bring in the plant medicine into the toolbox as well you've only
given parents and you know and children alike more opportunities to find whatever their unique fit
is going to be absolutely yep all right so you have now come out the back end of your own you
know journey through cancer you've got this new you know perspective on life how does that now
affect the way that you view the fire service we touched on it early as far as some of the issues
that we are still doing wrong that we haven't evolved what was your perspective now on elements
when it came to you know the actual gear that we wear and pfas and the exposures and the diesel
fumes and all the things that we've been talking about but a lot of us still haven't taken seriously
yeah uh that's a pretty that's a that's a loaded question um gosh there you know i spent five years
working in this field uh dedicated as a in an administrative position and i remember early on
thinking gosh you know how bad is this problem and the more i read the more more i got frustrated
the more i more i realized that we've been doing things wrong for a long time and the the current
fire service the modern day's fire service has inherited a lot of problems um and i think let
me start here uh the cultural issue is is one of those things that jumps out of me is one of those
things that's fixable but we as firefighters have to own it we have to fix it um if we're going to
fix it it means we have to have buy-in it means everybody has to be on the same page and i remember
when i you know got started in this whole cancer awareness and prevention program somebody asked me
says kyle what what does cancer awareness prevention mean to you and what what is the program
and i said well i started thinking then i wasn't really putting a lot of thought into it well it's
you know it's policy and sog changes supported by infrastructure changes um it's a you know a social
marketing campaign to fix this problem and all these different things and then i stopped and
really thought about it and i says you know what it is it's all of us it's never one person it's
not the person who's the the person in the position who's running it it's never one person it's
everybody and it only works if we all believe in it so we really i really think that we one one of
the things i looked at was how do we break down these barriers but we have to draw emotional
impact you know i tell my story and i shared my story today with you about my cancer um it's
pretty personal right not everybody wants to share their story but i do it in hopes that people will
learn from it and and it will impact them emotionally to see the the the greatest
the loss right and here's one of the things that i've realized when i share and i say i've lost a
year and a half of my career the bigger impact is i lost a year and a half of my my kids and my wife
and i said i i feel like i stepped into a time machine and i fast forwarded a year and a half
and when i woke up my daughter that was six months old is now two years old and it just completely
it changes it changed me and i i just that's that's the impact that's the loss so if we can make
decisions right now today that can prevent that i mean think about that nobody wants that to happen
to themselves it just it's brutal um so that cultural component of this is really important
and it has to be i think the starting point is that people have to understand that it all starts
with me it all starts with me the changes within me then there's the parts that i would like to
get into about we know exposures are bad right and most departments a lot of departments there's
still some that aren't have caught on to the fact that we need to do things like post-fire crust
decontamination we need to wash our gear better we need to do all the personal decontamination
components the wipes the showering at the station and we need to prioritize those things
and that's the on-scene stuff right and then there's those things that are a little more subtle
you know the diesel exhaust extraction systems in the station you know um having that i i'd say
most people think that death for some reason magically makes diesel exhaust healthier for us
and i argue that that's not true um you know and obviously we know that there's some concerns there
so you got it you got to do those things you got to do the small things every day that you know
keep those things from factoring and adding up on us and then the the added you know the bigger
the bigger things need to happen too and it starts with the leader at the station it starts with the
captains the the biggest influence in the fire service as we know is our fire captains they run
the company and they have the ability to firmly say that we need to do these things and personally
i'm seeing them not happen now that i'm back in into operations as a captain i'm not seeing them
happen and people aren't taking them serious so we have things at our fingertips right but the
firefighters unfortunately i'm one of them and i'm guilty of some of these things but we like to
complain and we like to complain that these things don't happen but were we really doing them are we
taking them serious are we considering them are they in our minds although they we keep the
information comes out over and over and over again about the same things right we have these
stand downs in january january's dedicated firefighter cancer awareness but how many
people are getting on their computer and reading the information how many captains are sitting down
with their crew and making sure that they're doing how many chief officers are ensuring that
decon gets set up at every fire right this is these are the changes that have to happen until
they do unfortunately we're going to continue to see the numbers rise and i hate to say that but
it's true and for many departments that haven't had a cancer case and maybe think it's not going
to happen sorry but it's just a matter of time the odds are against us in so many ways so those are
our big areas i think we need to continue to um the death by a thousand cuts approach we need to
continue to drive that home we need people out there that have have gone through really bad form
you know have gone through cancer they're the best spokesperson spokespeople are the firefighters
that are cancer survivors they could stand up in front of people have instant credibility and talk
to them like people and tell them literally how bad it is and that you don't want this and that
there's things you can do every day to to help keep this from happening uh ppe pfos
gosh well ppe we need to do a better job of teaching our people about ppe most people most
firefighters probably don't know a whole lot about nfpa 1970 and 1851 and the the criteria in there
and here in the state of california 1851 is now state law so we're required to do those things
like a preliminary exposure reduction and those different things that need to happen
you know and then the pp itself and we get into pfos i mean pfos is a really complicated topic
i've done a very deep dive into it yes it's in our gear yes it's in our station wear is it in all of
it no it's in some of it probably most of it it's in a lot of things it's in pizza boxes it's in
all this not to diminish with the the how bad it is it's bad it's a class of chemicals that
is as an endocrine disruptor an immune suppressor and the way i frame it is you know you you as
firefighters um that essentially eliminates your body armor for when you do get exposed to those
really bad chemicals so what can we do better there well i mean for one um you know i just think that
we don't need to wear our gear all the time you know and there's nuisance calls that we need to
evaluate um you know hospital ringing alarms for example that you know you've probably looked back
historically in the records and seen that there's never there's been very few actual responses for
to some of these nuisance ringing alarms maybe surface street traffic accidents things like that
that i've had discussions about so should we be in structure gear for those or can we get maybe
uh a more tactical form of equipment or ppe that people wear that's pfos free that you know
but we're not going to completely be able to eliminate this hazard i mean it's if it's
everywhere it's everywhere but we do need to do things and we do know that there are things out
there that are working to help eliminate at least certain forms of pfos in the blood the study that
came out of australia in regards to blood and plasma donation excuse me that's being replicated
in in arizona um all very important things that need to be looked at and done um and in low-hanging
fruit of of pfos is you know uh essential uh concepts for essential use take a look at that
you know is it is it essential is it non-essential or is it substitutable find those find it in one
of those three categories and and make recommendations to your department on based on that
um let's do you want to talk about sleep these guys i'm gonna keep you the microphone i've got
some things i'll ask after you are done but please lead us through these lists okay um you know so
i've kind of bounced around a little bit but when i started really looking at the exposure side of
things i started just basically thinking in terms of the fire scene back to the fire station and
everything in between and that's how i started to work on eliminating exposure and that's how i
wrote policies and um that's how i got infrastructure things and advocated for better things like wipes
and soaps and different cleaning supplies for decontamination developed a decontamination kit
for uh all of our apparatus including our reserve so that we can decon appropriately started
looking more into uh extractors that were nfp 1851 compliant to meet that criteria
uh making it more accessible to firefighters so they're all at there at every station in the
department i work for um and also looking at things that from the exposure side how do we track these
so that if there's an issue with workers compensation because cancer is presumptive in california you
know how do we make sure the firefighters are being taken care of uh so those are all things
and i'm just kind of highlighting them and just bumping on them quickly um uh but let's i'm gonna
move over into sleep for a little bit so obviously sleep disruption is is very bad and i'll tell you
i'll tell you one like aha moment i had is when i was in a a meeting for a research study we're
involved with here with locally with the salk institute and ucst for the healthy heroes study
which was in a sleep study it was actually more about time restricted eating and how maybe that
could improve firefighters health um and there was discussion about how that did actually improve
and make better sleep um but the actual circadian rhythm disruption component was really fascinating
and learning more about sleep and i am by no means an expert in that area but one aha moment i had
is when i was in this meeting and we were talking and one of the researchers brought up the fact
that shift workers were considered considered a class two or group to be possibly carcinogenic
a classification through iarq international agency for research on cancer and i was like what do you
mean like i hadn't read that anywhere didn't know that and i should i feel like i should have known
that and in the majority of what i was able to figure out about that that grouping and why
shift workers were brought into that grouping was the sleep disruption component and i said well
we're shift workers firefighters are shift workers this is not good and then that was several years
back and in fact then july of 2022 the firefighter occupational exposure was reclassified from group
to be possibly carcinogenic to group one one which was a known carcinogen and then it was really clear
to me that there's a toxic soup of of things the firefighters deal with the the the fire ground
exposures the the sleep disruption and then so on there's more there's a lot of things to this and
now you know the new challenges of how do you combat lithium ion and the pfos and those types
of hot topics so again it's a lot it's a lot of information and it's it's a big challenge all the
way around i've i've touched on all of them all of them have many many many details but i do think
as a whole the fire service service is getting better but there's not just one thing that is
involved here it's a lot of things let me let me go touch back into the sleep so one of the things
i have a problem with is so sleep hygiene right we we as firefighters don't sleep good at work
we know that's a problem so what do we do when we go home well i'm guilty of this and i used to
fall asleep by drinking a couple cocktails right well come to find out the falling asleep drinking
a couple cocktails actually reduces the amount of REM sleep you get so we we can't just you know
complain about these things affecting us and and then not go home and not have uh just be disciplined
enough to do these things appropriately you know if you know you don't sleep good at work then you
need to find time to sleep good at home now that's not the answer to the whole problem but that is
part of the issue i have with it is we can't just complain about something we actually have to do
something ourselves within our own power to fix it you know having a good nighttime routine
having a good you know get off your your mobile devices there's all those things you could go
deep into the details of it all but those are all all big problems with the sleep side of things
and then as a department we have to start looking and start thinking outside of the box some of the
things i've heard that some organizations are starting to do this mainly this first part is
mainly ambulances are starting to give them actual rest periods at night and taking them off and
taking them out of service and allowing them some time to sleep that's a step in the right direction
shift change maybe shift change should be at a different time i've heard some departments are
starting to do a 12 noon shift change and what that noon shift change might do is allow you time
to sleep in if you're on duty if you had a bad night maybe you get to sleep in a little bit
when you go home you're guaranteed at least the ability to go to sleep at night and not have to
wake up early in the morning it's just a thought now it's not going to solve all the problems let
me just say this this is like this stands out to me the most in all this stuff as firefighters
and you're not going to like most firefighters are not going to like this but really to fix the
problem in my mind the biggest part of this is you need more fire stations you need to fill in more
gaps in the district you need more firefighters you need more units running calls out there to
start to reduce the amount of call volume that each individual firefighter responds to
to start to eliminate some of those wakeups we're all going to have to share it we're all going to
have to wear it but more stations more firefighters right those resources have to if you're in a fire
department that hasn't grown much in the last five to ten years think about how much your population
has grown and think about how much run call call volume has gone up if you don't start adding to
reduce that effect on the membership they're just they're just running all those calls i don't where's
in a slow station left in my department they're all gone they used to be there used to be slow
stations right and those are the ones that young guys didn't want to work at because they wanted
to be where the action was but but now they're all somewhat busy and most most of them are so
you have to combat that side of it too because you are a firefighter you start to age in the fire
service you're you're you're not wanting to get up and run 15 calls a day and five after midnight
your body just can't endure that for 30 years so i i'm just kind of throwing a bunch of stuff all
out at once but those there's so many areas that if you even mentioned it i could probably focus
in on it more but it's it's a complicated problem there are a lot of just different sides to it
different things that are problematic and there are solutions to some of these and some of them
are still building the airplane in the air and trying to figure out how to fix it so i'll pause
there well one one area you didn't mention when it came to sleep which people listen to this podcast
i've been preaching for seven years now and this is you know when you're talking about it's on us
this is the problem that we have there's so many of us still believe fairy tales unicorns and
rainbows and the fact that firefighters have the best shift in the world and we only work 10 days
a month when you actually break it down we don't work one day on two days off for example we work
three day three eight hour days crammed together so we work three days on one day off or 30 days a
month so this is the first thing we need to debunk this fallacy that we have this amazing
schedule because we fucking don't 56 hours a week before mandatory overtime is not a dream schedule
secondly and i've had two great um guests one um chief hubert ruder chief of pointon beach who
went to 2472s um about a year ago now and then dixon phillips union leader in pasco county here
in florida they are about to go to that system in a couple years so you got one that's made it
happen already one that's kind of ramping up to do it but both of them i'd love to say that their
departments are just like we love our firefighters so much we're going to change it because of their
mental health and their physical health but it was money they realized that they were bleeding money
on overtime and all these other things and going to a healthier shift saves money hand over fist
so anyone can look at those two episodes and listen to the why behind it and what's beautiful
is the dominoes are falling here in florida finally they are falling and now the departments
around are going well shit if they go to that department and we're struggling to hire now how
the hell are we going to hire when these other departments are doing it better than us they
become what they call destination departments the other kind of kick back to that is like oh well
you know but how are we going to hire we don't have enough people now circling back to what you
and i said these young candidates now see the work week is a lot more healthy you know what i think
i am going to be a firefighter and gainesville has seen that here where the recruitment line has
started to line up outside the door again pascoe boynton so that's the other part and i agree and
it needs to be a double-pronged attack you need to educate people from the front door about sleep
hygiene i talk about this all the time if you get an extra 24 hours between two shifts which is what
we need to do it just bring it to a 42-hour work week basically the same as all the people that
make decisions that firefighters should not get more time off they work 40 hours so you're bringing
it down to their their work week but then you educate them look go hang drywall go dig you know
be landscapers whatever it is if you want extra money go do it but don't take a night shift at
er don't work for a private ambulance company understand that you need to be in your bed and
then understand the sleep hygiene and the acute effects of sleep deprivation the chronic effects
of sleep deprivation now you've put the onus on the individual and the employer simultaneously
so i think that's a big part of the conversation but we have this i kind of called us called the
fire service out a while ago i'm like we're so courageous in a fire yet such giant pussies when
it comes to advocating for our own health and more time with our families and it's about time that
we look in the mirror and say why the fuck do i not deserve to be at home with my children and
my wife or my husband the same amount of time that the average civilian that i protect does
so this is i think a real kind of you know point now if we want to affect the mental health and
the cancer and the obesity and the hormonal disruption that's got half of our men on trt
and our women on the same then we have to bring this into the equation if we're going to talk
about dcon and pfas if we're going to talk about what we see in peer support we have to also talk
about the work week so that's the one thing i would add to your your sleep conversation
i like it i like it i think they're that's that that's an out of the box thought process that
needs to happen and it makes sense right we we know that we need to sleep we need to make we need
to find a better way to get sleep we need to take better care of our people so time will improve
this and it it's been you know what it's been really rewarding to be a part of i can tell you
i don't have all the answers i do think very logical try to keep my thought processes simple
but if if uh if you're we're dealing with a recruitment problem there's a really good
tool right there if you in your organization have a robust health and safety program that takes into
account the sleeping component the shift changing of the shift maybe work cycles where there's
mandatory breaks different things like that you're going to see a better recruitment you're going to
improve the firefighters lives their outcomes we're going to start to reduce these numbers
because they're there and the numbers don't lie and that's it learn from somebody who learned the
hard way i i will tell you all day long i wish i could go back and change some of my my thought
processes as a young aggressive firefighter but i still to this day um love the job i think it's
amazing personally i love what we're able to do to help people but it's the people at the station
that matter the most going into the work is all about the guys you know and and if you're one of
those people if that resonates with you then realize that we have to change we can't continue
to ride this old fire tradition you know the hundred years unimpeded by progress thought
process anymore you have to we have to start thinking of very innovative ways of fixing these
problems and there's solutions out there somewhere in between all these discussions and all these
questions and all these answers there's there's a there's a path forward and a way to fix it so
one more area when it comes to dcon that i have observed you know i mean now we have a lot of
departments where you know like 50 60 percent of departments got five years on or less so these are
young people coming on where a lot of these lessons are being learned now and you know it's it's some
of the same ones that i see you know a year in they've already bought their leather helmet
they've got the big old bushy mustache and they're all chiming in on the you know um clean cabs stop
grabs bullshit that i hear banging around too so talk to me about ego and narcissism as an opposition
to to progress because you know when it comes to for example leather radio straps i've got leather
radio strap with a name on they're beautiful but when you learn about what leather does as far as
its porous element and and being a sponge to carcinogens then you think well should i be a
cunt my throat for you know ems call after ems call when i've just had it in a structure fire
two shifts back you know so i also talk about the the the uh you know leather fire helmet the same
thing and there's this real nauseating kind of ridiculing of the european helmet which is you
know easy to decon ergonomic light you know and as you were talking about trying to fight
wildland fire in bunker gear that's kind of what we're doing now with that so where i see resistance
to progress and thus preventing a lot of these needless deaths that we have in the fire service
our own ego is a part of it and and this is just through my eyes i see a lot of resistance and
ignorance created even people by people that are being hired in a generation that now should know
better yeah what's that saying about three years of mustache and a leather helmet you know big
lifted truck you know when you talk to guys that have been in the fire service for any amount of
time um and certainly there's guys have been doing this a lot longer than me and the guys those are
the guys i look up to um i'll tell you this this is one really important thing i remember
probably one of the best firefighters um most legendary figures in my department
he was also the only firefighter who ever was a lead instructor at our academy and there was a
very good reason for that he was really good at his job and really really well respected it wasn't
until years later that i put something together i remember working a shift with him when i was on
probation and i noticed how clean his helmet his leather helmet was it kept it very clean now
here's a guy who went to a lot of fires who fought a lot of fire again very well respected busy station
a guy and uh i realized that he kept his helmet clean because that's what we were supposed to do
and you didn't need a dirty helmet to tell everybody else around you that you'd been to
a lot of fires they just knew right and i when i finally realized that i just is this again on
like another aha moment like man that's so powerful for me in my mind that we can convey that to the
younger generation you don't need to have a dirty helmet you don't need to have dirty gear
and this this concept of clean cabs stops grabs or whatever listen i had a captain in texas called
me one day he says i just wanted to ask you some questions about your fire apparatus
shoot go ahead he said yeah um it's my understanding you used to have the scbas in the seats
in the jump seats i said yes sir he says do you know why i found out that you don't have them in
in there anymore i said yes we we got rid of them some years back but to be honest with you i don't
know why so i had dug around a little bit and i asked the questions and i got a hold of a couple
of our different chiefs at the time the reason we removed them had nothing to do with clean cab but
it had everything to do with tactical pause at a fire because it's our belief in our culture is
that when we had our scbas on the outside of the apparatus and during the opportunity where you're
donning your ba you're taking a look at the fire and that tactical pause moment that's why we we
moved back to that um and it just happened to work out well for the the clean cab part as well
like years later and so i told him then he says well our guys here don't want to move away from
them in the seat they think that they they get a uh extra i don't know whatever 10 or 15 seconds
it could be the difference between a life and death and i said really that's a good question
a life and death and i said really that's their that's their that's what they're saying right now
they can't they can't hop out of the rig faster and and get to their ba and do multiple things
at the same time right i mean usually i what i teach my guys is when i get to that cabinet i
get my once i get my ba over my head i'm moving the path of direction towards a hose line if i'm
going back to my firefighting days back to my days of pulling hose so you're moving you're doing
two things at once and it's quick it doesn't have to be slow you just have to be efficient and and
faster not only that there we're seeing a lot less knee and hip and shoulder injuries from
dismounting the apparatus wearing an extra 40 pounds of equipment you know so you got to weigh
all those things uh into the equation are you really that much faster also funny enough i've
can't count how many times i've seen people not get their headset off and they're all wrapped up in
their their seat belts and their different things right i mean we can all just be a little vulnerable
here for a moment i've been there i have absolutely been there so so is it faster i mean that that's a
question is it is it that much faster i don't like having my mask on entering exiting the rig
personally because it's going to fog up before i get to the where i'm at i'm my vision is more
obscured there's so many different reasons but that's you know you have to decide you have to
make up make a decision not to make excuses we can do this job efficiently both ways
i i like having the scbs outside of the cab and i think it's cleaner i think it's better for our
health i also think that we can still do the same job just as well with them outside of the cab so
you know you're i think that we can debunk that that mindset and uh again for the same
same people that are out there that think that way uh you know just put yourself in somebody's
shoes you who's start talking to people that have had cancer and you'll think differently
those are the people you need to be having conversations with and not thinking you're
you're you're you're tougher than everybody else around you because i tell you what you get cancer
you won't be as tough anymore well firstly thank you because that's such a powerful testament from
someone who is the voice that we need to be listening to but i've talked about this a few
times you know i went to fire academy and i think i'm sure thinking back you know you're all dressed
up and ready to leap out the engine when you get to your scenario because it's fire academy you
know and then went and worked in the miami area for about a year and the packs were in the cab
and then i went to california and firstly the way that we were taught to throw ladders in florida
which was like a suitcase carry with the 24 lay in front of the building lay it down walk up the
rungs you know turn it around you button it from the side which never made any fucking sense to me
fucking says to me whatsoever you know and then you go to california you know and you're spiking
the ladder and high shoulder throws and you know all the things you go this is better this is just
better than the way i was taught that's a simple fact you know now i can actually navigate in an
alleyway and throw a ladder i can throw a ladder if there's cars or hedges in the way the way i was
taught in florida i couldn't and then i become a tillerman on a truck company and so my pack now
the packs were in the inside and anaheim's engines and the front of the truck but in the tillerman
position you had to have it down in in the cabinet and it took 10 seconds to throw that thing on
and so when this conversation came in and i had david and stefan from the healthy firefighter as
you know and and got to hear the whole you know story behind the swedish model and the cancer
deaths that initiated that and they're not creating surgical sterility at the cab they're just removing
anything that's going to off gas from you and where you're sitting and breathing but you hear
this say you know clean cab stops grabs bullshit and i say exactly the same thing that you just did
if you are leaping like a gazelle from a fire engine right through the front door of a building
you are gonna fucking die it's that simple because you have no idea what you're doing
chances are you need to stop look at where you're going to go in listen to your company officer get
with your partner make sure you've checked each other's gear you know when you actually mask up
and then you make entry and the other thing is the um the seat belt the the time that i was not
seatbelted in a moving fire vehicle wasn't my jacket because i'd already put my jacket on before
i stepped in it was putting my straps on so now you add that element too if you wreck and we're
all bunkering up in the back you're going through the windshield versus you sit down it's ergonomically
sound you don't get an scba in your back if you do wreck and then you get off you take that tactical
pause you throw on your gear and you are a better firefighter that way as well as adding in the
preventative element of not being exposed to car signatures or minimizing that exposure so i want
to thank you because you've mirrored exactly the way i think and again that ego narcissism
cancerous element that is putting all this bullshit out we have to have the humility to say i was
told this way but that way is better yep 100 and just add one more thing with that is you know think
of the time okay if you have an scba in your seat if you're going to move over into that seat now
you're dealing with some you're dealing with all your straps and messing with all your things right
are you paying attention to your approach into the incident are you catching the your interior size up
of the building when if you're not sitting in that seat messing with all that gear you're looking at
the fire you're getting an idea you're starting to develop what's what you're going to do what's your
approach how much hose do you need to pull what what what is what is going on with their your read
on the building do you have bars on the on the building do you have you know all those things
that are going to go through your head that's another little tactical pause is before you exit
the cab and if you're fussing with your scba that's in the seat that sometimes gets strapped in and
you get stuck and all these different things i mean and you're a better firefighter we can throw
scbas fast i mean if you're good at your job you don't need that i don't care how you throw it you
throw it over your head you do the shoulder method or whatever your department does i mean you should
be able to throw that scba fast it shouldn't be taking you more than like you said about 10 seconds
if that you open the compartment it's on your back and you're moving um yeah i mean people can
come up with all kinds of um i guess it sounds cool in the moment it makes me sound tough and
you know i'm i'm i'm the big firefighter bad firefighter but talk to people that have um have
lived some really unfortunate things and you know you want to start to do is think about how can we
best integrate the best of both worlds and make it work better for our people i was supposed to have
a firefighter i think he was california anthony ben alisha on the show um and we had talked i think
it was late last year um he was fighting you know a cancer batter of his own um and then we'd
scheduled a time and he actually messaged me is that james i'm going through you know this chemo
is a little rough um you know can we can we reschedule and he was dead three weeks later
this is the reality of why you're so passionate why i'm so passionate about this i lost one
of my my uh fellow firefighters in orange county carl andreano i think he was 23 or 24 years old
you know i'm i'm about to turn 50 i've had two of carl's lifetimes right now so this is why i get
so wound up about this fucking ignorance in the fire service because until we stop this mythology
this chest beating and saying it's for them it's not it's for you you want to look a certain way
you want your mustache and your helmet and your dirty gear you know and your your bullshit rhetoric
when if you truly think it's for them then start doing it for not only the people you serve
but your family when you come home and the men and women to the left and right of you
that's what matters the most when all said and done here's one of the things i'll tell you is we
have uh what i remember as you know pillars of the department you know legacy members of the department
that i would remember now and if i started to share the story in a fire station
these young guys don't know who i'm talking about and kind of a sad reality is is that
nobody remembers those people after a certain period of time and those are my memories and those
are things that i have of those people being just influential in my my career but when you leave this
job what matters is your family they're the only one that are going to be left for you after you
retire you may still have some of your fire department friends but what matters is your
family they're they're the most important thing i can tell you if you think about anything in your
career for those members here that may be younger or even older i mean think about the lost time
i i tell you what i i never will get that year and a half of my life back i can't replicate that i
doubt that little girl that was six months old is two years old i lost that time you don't get it
back i have to try to make i feel responsible for making up for it right as a husband and father you
know i have to do my part but if you're not even if you don't have kids you could think about your
family members who don't they don't want to see you go through that they live it too they have to
go through it with you all these things that are trying to um if you're trying to overshadow
something that's not a cool concept or a cool idea and it's not fun and it's it's just not cool
i'm going to say things that just devalue it you know that that's just inappropriate right
talk to the old guys start listening to them those are the guys that have been there and those are
the guys that know what to do and when those old guys are telling the new guys that man i really
wish i would have had this cancer prevention stuff in my career that would have really really would
have made a difference then then you're starting to really focus in on what matters your family
uh doing things the right way the saying of there's always time to do the right thing i mean think
i mean think about it there's a bigger picture and when you i guess maybe through age and
through time and experience you start to realize that those that mentality of that i'm indestructible
you're not let me just tell you you know what right now today if somebody comes up to you and
you know hey i prayed today you had to go to the doctor's office you're not feeling well
and you left there today with a cancer diagnosis how much would that change your life how much
would that affect you how much of that badass thinking matters now it doesn't it doesn't matter
at all it's it's in it's it's non-existent it your mind completely goes into another place
and you start to go into survival mode because you don't know how you're gonna if i'm gonna live
or not it's a different if it's completely different experience it'll change your life
you don't want it to happen to you it's not the kind of life-changing experience you want um and
all that stuff you thought was cool and important not not important not cool doesn't matter the
reality of what matters is your life uh being able to live as long as you can as healthy as you can
um and having a family and having your family and those are the people that will be with you
from now until the end as long as they live or until as long as you live but those other things
that you think matter not important don't matter sorry that's the reality absolutely well i want
to make sure that we cover some of the incredible things that you've been able to put in place so
in your department if a man or woman discovers that they do have a cancer diagnosis walk me
through the tools that you've put in place to help that firefighter through their journey now
well yeah so the way i've approached them and they're all different and i don't have a written
algorithm of how to go down through it but the general flow path is you know when most of the
people when they call i know who they are i know them most of them um so i talk to them and i
and i can kind of hear it in their voice something's wrong and obviously realize that
there's a reason they're calling me and it's usually not a good one but i just i talk to them
much like if you haven't gone through any peer support training um you know just talk to them
and try to understand what's going on and and everyone's a little different you know some
people are really upset and some people are just still in shock and they're going through the
the stages of death or or those kinds of things that are kind of cycling through in their head
and since i've lived it i've been able to relate in some ways of like where they're at and try to
make sense of it for them or like help them through that process and then um get them the support you
know the i i'm the assistant state director here for in california for firefighter cancer support
network so um i have close closely work with them and getting the resources that they offer to our
members which is their cancer toolkit and then their mentorship program so kind of starting there
that's kind of a starting point is just kind of understanding what's going on the gravity of the
diagnosis of what kind of cancer they're dealing with what kind of treatment plan is going on and
i'm not really there to offer um you know health advice if you will uh but i you know it's a gray
area i kind of step out there a little bit and make sure they're they're advocating for themselves
you know what's net what's the next step in this process get them thinking of the questions they
should be asking the doctor the tough questions um you know ensuring that they're they're taking
care of themselves and that they have people to help them so kind of start there there's also some
financial resources we can tap into uh we also do meal um uh the meal uh what do you call it
we kind of like bring meals to our people we have a whole thing and i'll think of the meal train
but um train thinking uh meal train uh to support our members um you know that you'd be surprised
how far that goes to help the member and their family especially their family because they're
their caretaker right um and then you know there's the part that you got to do the deal with the
paperwork here in the state of california and all states have some level of a cancer presumptive law
here it's presumptive thankfully the the agency i work for we have really streamlined the work
comp process to the point of when i was in the position i would just i would get the phone call
i would deal with all the resources and and and you know my approach to the person was just really
caring for the individual and then it would stem into the hey you know since you have a diagnosis
we have to get the paperwork rolling and it's pretty straightforward we have a packet it has
everything in it from the state forms that are required to our own department uh city forms
and i would stop what i'm doing and i would go um meet them somewhere take care of that and importantly
uh very importantly get a one page summary diagnosis of their cancer so that it's indisputable
we know we we have a diagnosis and um i would we complete the paperwork and for us there's a call
in process that's a supervisory component and then i would just take all that that paperwork in the
packet signed um and i would hand deliver it to our work comp division and within within minutes
they're already in the system and in just a very short amount of time their cancer claims approved
now we didn't get to that overnight it took time to get there it took conversations with risk
with our risk management department and workers compensation division to get to a point where we
had a streamlined approach like that i've heard so many things over the over the course of my time
in the in the position and even still now that other departments don't have that they're denied
they're delayed every time and i think that there's a big challenge within workers compensation
alone and all you don't have to go very far if you just go to one of the workers compensation fraud
conventions you'll understand that they deal with a lot of fraud and um generally speaking it does
happen but it's unfortunate that a bad few bad seeds out there ruin it for the rest of us people
that are good people that are trying to do good things for this for our department and the public
and everything and then we're being mistreated because of of things like that um but that's part
of the process it's getting that work comp piece done you know it's the business part of it and
and you gotta you gotta be efficient you gotta get it done quickly and so that's kind of how i did
that and then i most of the time served as the person's mentor um continually supporting him
through the process i've done things i've done everything from take people to their
chemotherapy appointments um because they couldn't get a ride to bring them a meal to um get guys
over there to mow their lawn you know have christmas presents you name it like you know
give them everything that you would want for yourself you know make their lives easier
uh reduce the burden of paperwork um take that off their plate because they they got to deal
with cancer they got to deal with fighting something that's gonna it's either gonna say
they're either gonna live or they're not and you got to give them the chance and you got to make
it as comfortable and as possible and just kind of be um their wrestling coach beautiful
beautiful i mean you've you've got in place so many things i'm sure a lot of people listening
are gonna probably want to reach out to you because you've done so much work to get to this point
and the the thing that really jumps out is that you've removed as many of the external stresses
as you can to someone who's been given such a horrendous diagnosis and factoring back to for
example you mentioning having two mortgages simply just to get the medication for your daughter
in our broken health care system what's heartbreaking is someone firstly gets a diagnosis
of something terrifying like that and then they understand the financial implication which is a
kind of double whammy on this thing so by getting all these ducks in a row making sure that you know
you're getting them approved when it comes to the presumptive law and streamlining wortman's comp
you've taken a lot of the the stresses that arguably would make the cancer worse
away from the firefighter yes yeah it when i when i went through it because i walked through this path
um it was complicated and it wasn't as easy as i would have liked it and i i realized when i got
in the position that i was going to change that i was going to do something about that because nobody
should have to deal with oh i can't get prescriptions approved you know that shouldn't
be a problem because i'm not going to be able to do that because i'm not going to be able to do
that shouldn't be that shouldn't be an issue you know you're you're not well you're um if you're
going through chemo or radiation or any other form of cancer treatment you are sick and the last thing
you want to think about is oh i need to get this piece of paperwork in because i need to get
something approved you know that's that that shouldn't matter and so one of the other things
i mentioned earlier on was the nurse case managers and uh them you know all these these or maybe i
didn't mention it but nurse case manager so we we have them as a pre-authorized thing for our
members who get diagnosed with cancer and they're worth their weight in gold these are
rns that are able to you know work with you on things you need whether it's paperwork approved
medications approved and off hours on the weekends things like like that or or different things like
i mentioned i needed things i didn't know i needed like a commode in a hospital bed in my house and
and later on when i was um my last um my last uh major infection i was at home infusing for two months
um with the and i had to self-administer all this stuff for i was like infusing for like 18 hours a
day on these different heavy antibiotics they were the ones that were able to make that happen so
you want to provide your people at the end of the day ultimately my i think my message here is you
want to provide your people as many resources possible to give them to reduce that burden and
and just it's already hard enough let's not make it harder on them let's make it easier
so someone goes through treatment hopefully successfully they're wanting to return to duty
i don't know if i think you and i talked about this but i've certainly had it mentioned before
an element that is often forgotten is the reintegration of someone back into the
workforce whether it's a mental health challenge that they suffered or cancer or or some sort of
injury um a lot of them feel ill prepared and sometimes it may be even kind of out of the
tribe by that point so what have you observed with that conversation
well i have a firsthand experience on that one um just to share with you that so i when i got
finally got done with all my treatment and complications and everything i the department
was really good about getting me a light duty assignment um they gave me the opportunity to
i mean shoot i had i'm just i like 2000 plus emails um i had like a thousand vector solutions
assignments that were were past due i mean you think about your worst welcome firefighters
having all that red right well think about having just pages of red so uh yeah i mean
that's that's like the business side of things but then there's like the mental side of things and
the physical side of things so i think it's important to develop an um injury prevention
and rehabilitation program for your department um if you don't know what that is uh look it up
and read about it and learn about it um we are fortunate to have um physical therapists so i
didn't at the time have physical therapists but that would have been really good um and i think
just keep trying things like i my whole body hurt my whole freaking body hurt i was trying to get
back and part of it getting a little older too on top of it but i did all kinds of things that i used
to poopoo back in the day like yoga and um different things like that and it it really
helped me really really helped me i started to clean up my diet a lot um cut back and i'll find
a lot of things i don't drink anymore i'm a non-drinker and i can talk to you about that if
if you want to see some major life improvements stop drinking that'll improve your life greatly
and your and your pocketbook um but yeah i think what we really get into is the the cancer
survivorship right the you've survived cancer and you're coming back into the department
what happened to me was i went through the the the six months of light duty came back in my first
shift my first call was a terminally ill cancer patient i don't know that i was ready for that
i didn't at the time i had to step out of the room i wasn't ready i was still mentally
mentally hurting i had the i was able to step out of the room being the apparatus operator at the
time and just kind of gather myself and think about the fact that this is going to continue
and i'm going to see more stuff and i'm going to see more bad stuff too but i think going through
a cancer survivorship course uh miami did a great job um the university of miami created a course
it's online it's free i actually got to be a part of the the build of that curriculum and uh shoot
it it touches on everything the physical the the the behavioral component uh things that you can do
to kind of prepare yourself to be ready to go and then to some to some degree um you have to decide
what's going to help you what what's going to help you and and getting you back and then so when i was
in the position people that were coming back and reintegrating back into the workforce i would i
would bring to bring things to light i would make them think about things like hey or you know are
you physically okay because there's a physical side of this job like we have to pass a physical
test to be able to come back after being out for a certain amount of times a certain amount of time
but we don't really talk about the behavioral side are you mentally prepared because it's going to
be hard it's going to be maybe harder and your new hundred percent of where you're at now after
going through so much treatment is going to be different than the person you were before are you
are you ready so all good questions all things that i think that cancer survivorship
online program does address and i think it's uh we can we can certainly do more hey and since
we're talking about it go meet with a psychologist you should be meeting with a psychologist if you
get diagnosed with cancer get get a phone appointment go meet with psychologists start
talking to them start start airing out your dirty laundry start getting the mental side
of the discussion going because it is very much a part of it is is just as much as the physical
absolutely so sorry um one last thought there is is that at some point you're going to have to
rip off the band-aid and come back if you're planning to come back to the job you're just
going to have to rip it off and you're going to have to do it and just know that it will get
better and that's saying about time healing all wounds is is true it for me it took quite a while
longer than i wanted but it did get better i did get back to the job i'm not quite as
strong as i used to be maybe but i'm still able to do the job i'm still able to keep up and uh
it's it's uh it's something really uh if you can overcome it it it's the resilience like you spoke
of earlier just to be able to overcome cancer come back to this job is is a huge lift and it's it
should be it's commendable in my mind and all the people that i've been able to help bring back
i brought more back than not and i'll never forget the the compliments and the thanks and the
appreciation that was shown to me for for bringing the help helping them through it all because it
it's a it's a it's a disaster in your life that you have to live and so if you plan on coming back
to the department in one piece you have to fix yourself and so anyway i'll kind of stop no no
it's been amazing i've got one more thing to ask you and then we'll close up because you've been
talking for over two hours now but i have had a few people on here and i cringe when i think that
they go back to the very shifts that contributed to the cancer in the first place not the only
thing but contributed amplified reduce the armor as the example you used earlier what are your
thoughts on a cancer survivor returning back to duty but if possible entering a 40 hour spot where
they sleep at night versus being on shift work again that would that's best case scenario if
you could bring somebody back and put them in an administrative assignment whether or not
having to be exposed to as many things anymore the the sleep issue as we talked about that that's
certainly the best case example and that's actually kind of what happened to me to some
to some extent although i don't think i worked 40 hours i worked a lot more than 40 hours because
of the demand and i well one thing i will tell you is i my oncologist very directly told me
you might think about finding a new a new career you know it was very obvious to him what caused
the cancer in his opinion it was the career being a firefighter the exposures he certainly told me
don't go back to busy fire stations because that that was not a good plan and not good for me and
my health but i did have a straight-to-assignment for five years unfortunately because i take things
very serious i probably stress put i had more stress in that position than normally but
uh all things said and done it's uh reducing those exposures better sleep if you can improve those
things you're you're doing yourself uh so you know you're doing your body is solid and you're and
you're staying to live longer if you do it that way i'm kind of hard-headed and uh i wanted to get
back to the job at some point just to prove to myself i could do it again and that i was still
capable and so here i am doing it again and but i don't have any ambition to go back to the busy
houses um i was in them long enough and i did my time and uh now it's more about you know doing
other things in the department that will improve every you know improve the department make it
better um and leave it better than i got it ultimately leave it better than i got it beautiful
well kyle i want to say firstly that mark was absolutely right this was such a phenomenal
conversation and that lived experience the same with the mental health conversation is what we
need it's all well and good that someone gets in front of us and gives us a you know slideshow and
you know talks about statistics and all these kind of things but that doesn't really grab us by the
throat and make us pay attention but when it's from someone who's been through hell and has been
through hell and i think one of the most poignant things that you said was that you lost a year and
a half with your family i hope that really resonated with people so this is the very
conversation people need to hear and then the solutions that you brought to your department
that people can can learn from i think is incredibly powerful too so i want to thank you
firstly for your courageous vulnerability and secondly for being so generous with your time
and your knowledge and coming on the behind the shield podcast today hey thanks jim for
having me it's uh it's an honor to be here it's been a great experience thanks for listening to me
and you know i'm just i'm very like i said earlier i'm very passionate about fixing this problem and
so i i pull out all the stops if it if it's me sharing my story another time to benefit others
or me sharing more ideas about how we fix these problems in the fire service i'm all about it and
again thanks so much for having me i appreciate this opportunity