I Can’t Believe I’m Doing This

There were a lot of times early in my career where I thought to myself, “I can’t believe I’m doing this”. To this day I occasionally get that feeling but more often I think, “I can’t believe I get to do this” which is a testament to a proper career choice. But, there were plenty of “I can’t believe I’m doing this” moments. I think my most dramatic example of this was a call for a beauty salon fire in my second year with the department.

Now, firefighters are pretty jaded by the call of “Respond to a fire alarm at such and such address”. If it’s not followed by reports of smoke and flames seen it’s usually nothing. So when we got toned out for a fire alarm in the next district over at 2 in the morning none of us thought it would be much of anything.
The first in engine arrived and saw some water leaking out from under the front door of a beauty salon and upon closer inspection realized that there were flames still burning on the counters and the sprinkler heads were discharging.

We were the second in and we caught the hydrant and brought a water supply to the attack engine. They had already extinguished most of the fire and so my firefighter and I were sent around back to shut down the sprinkler system. We found the shutoffs and cranked them down and made our way back to the front of the building. The attack crew was still inside the salon and we were assigned to check the occupancies on either side. We forced entry into the unit on the left and checked it out. Some ceiling tiles were missing and some drywall was broken inside. It looked like they were doing some remodeling. We moved on to the unit on the right. The same story in that unit, no fire or water damage but it looked like they were remodeling.

Crews were starting to mill about now as the emergency was over. So my firefighter and I decided to go check out the fire unit. It was dark inside and had about a half inch of standing water on the ground along with a lot of shattered mirror pieces from the walls above the workstations. The sprinkler heads were still draining making it hard to see very well. Just as we were making our way around a corner two members of the attack crew came quickly past us carrying a body. It was too dark to see and they passed us so quickly that I couldn’t tell if the victim was one of us or not. Before I could move to help them the rest of the crew came around the corner and the firefighter in front slipped on the broken mirror and went down. I swear he fell faster than gravity, right onto his SCBA bottle. That had to hurt. I reached down to help him up by grabbing his SCBA strap and he started yelling, “Take the girl, take the girl!”. I hadn’t even realized he had been carrying a child out of the building when he fell. I immediately took the girl in my arms and started making my way outside. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. All I could picture was the firefighter at the scene of the Oklahoma City bombing with the baby in his arms and thinking, “I can’t believe I’m doing this”.

When I got outside it was still dark. I looked around for the brightest area to work in and decided on moving into the parking lot under a street light. Another firefighter paramedic joined me while someone else ran to bring us equipment. There was another crew working on the man they’d pulled out first. I still couldn’t see who it was. I laid the girl down on the ground. She was wearing pajamas that were burned at the knees and several other spots. The first thing that struck me was that my daughter had the same pajamas. The girl’s burnt hands were covering her face and her hair was all over the place. I pulled her hands away from her face and was amazed to see that only her forehead and chin were burned but the rest of her face was clean, protected by her hands. I asked her name and age and was shocked and incredibly relieved when she opened her eyes and answered me “My name is Anna, I’m 7”.

The other medic and I immediately went to work. We cut the pajamas away and we each started an I.V.. As we started to put the burn blanket on her the skies opened up and it started dumping rain on us. Unbelievable. The blanket was just disintegrating in our hands. I was now cursing myself for moving into the parking lot instead of staying under the overhang outside the shop. Fortunately the ambulance arrived right then and we got the girl loaded and on her way to the hospital where she would make a full recovery.