S3: The Trauma Sponge

Jeremy Norton has been a firefighter for over 20 years, a job that’s considered heroic and honorable … a job that sometimes means showing up to a false alarm … and sometimes means soaking up the trauma of the city around you.

Jeremy has been a TTFA listener since day one. His first book — The Trauma Sponges: Dispatches From The Scarred Heart of Emergency Response — was published October 10, 2023.

This episode was originally published on September 18, 2023.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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Um, how are you? Most people answer that question with fine or good. But obviously it’s not always fine, and it’s usually not even that good.

This is a podcast that asks people to be honest about their pain. To just be honest about how they really feel. About the hard parts of life.

And guess what? It’s complicated.

The thing is, it’s a civil service job, and the same way we have incomprehensible bike lanes, the city’s overall plans and stuff are just gonna break your heart.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is terrible. Thanks for asking.

Prepare for run.

That’s gonna be a fire call for one or both of the other regs…

. initial assignment, Engine 6, Engine 8, Ladder 11, Chief 2, commercial fire alarm at 1111 West 22nd Street, the bridge, at 106 Bravo. Ladder 11’s en route from 3-line to Hennepin.

Received.

And that is Jeremy Norton, trying to sit down for an interview with our senior producer, Marcel Malekebu.

I’ve been with Minneapolis for 23 years. I’m the rank of captain, which is a supervisor, first-line supervisor.

Survey a group of little kids, and at least one of them will tell you that they want to be a firefighter when they grow up. Pay attention at Halloween. You’re going to see plenty of little kids wearing red plastic helmets and reflective jackets.

Because who wouldn’t want to grow up to be a hero?

It never crossed my mind. I say that in DC where I grew up, the Safeway where we would shop for food was right at the edge of Georgetown. So I would see firefighters in there every time we shopped.

But really, I would see the Georgetown Hoyas basketball. I would see Patrick Ewing shopping. That had a much bigger effect on me than seeing the DC FD guys and gals.

The reason why you’d see the firefighters is because they’re on a 24-hour shift and they shop together, so they have the food for their shift. But it never crossed my mind. And I also was never going to be a Georgetown Hoyas basketball player either.

So I wanted this for a couple of years because when I moved up here in 94, a woman I’d known a little bit in high school had just joined the fire department. And I was like, wow, that’s weird. I was working at a restaurant.

I had no health insurance. She had a paycheck. She had an interesting job.

And I was like, that sounds cool. And I’d been an English teacher before that. And I wanted something that didn’t take up 80 hours a week.

And so that’s how I kind of got in there.

But meeting Jen and learning about what she did really resonated because the kind of the challenge of a physical challenge, the challenge of helping people, challenge of engaging in the world, even though I didn’t understand any of what firefighting

When I get to the fire station, I figure I’m gonna be meeting Jeremy for the first time.

I call him, he comes out, but he ends up reminding me that we had met once before at a live show. Jeremy tells me that I was kind of pissed off looking when I was there, and I didn’t really remember that part.

My impression of Jeremy on this second first impression, I guess, is that he kind of looks like a vegan rockabilly volunteer barista at a used bookstore.

And what impresses me about him in this second first interaction, is that he can communicate and carry on a conversation during things like this.

And the lights and the speakers will stay on for up to four or five minutes after each one. And so if it were for just the chief, the crews here in the middle of the night will be, you know, awaken because we’re trained to wake up and respond.

Like you learn how to be a light sleeper and then you’ll just sit there waiting for the lights to go off. And we can’t, like, that’s one of the kind of the modern…

Now for the sake of content, that interruption came right on time. But let’s get back to the interview.

It is kind of a lottery. For Minneapolis, you know, for most full time city departments, it’s a civil service test.

Jeremy’s first try at the test happens in 1996, and the test is divided into parts. One of the parts that kind of creeps me out a little bit, and I’m not quite sure why, is the psychological profile.

It’s like, are you, you know, do you like fire? Will you steal? Would you rather kiss your mom or, you know, throw rocks at a dog?

So Jeremy passes that part just fine.

But he also has to do a written test and a physical aptitude test.

Dragging the dummy is the last part of the physical test. It used to be. And that was prohibitive for a lot of people.

Like lifting a 185 pound dummy, you know, and getting it, it used to be, you have to put the dummy in the window to simulate a rescue.

Now, even though we do everything in pairs, and so there are very few times that I’m alone in a building, it was still this idea that, can you do these fire ground tasks? And then I had bronchitis the day I took the test.

I was hauling ass through the different stations of the test. I got to the dummy, I’m dragging it, and I’m wheezing like a freight train. I’m just wheezing because I’ve got bronchitis.

And I get to the window and the dummy slips out of my hands. And I had never once problem solved.

So all the women that I’ve been watching train, and I’d never had to problem solve myself because it had never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be able just to lift the dummy.

But so I get to the window, and I’m hypoxic, and I’m adrenalized, and I’m panicked. And I basically just lost my mind. I could not figure out how to lift.

And because the dummy was leaning against the wall, there’s friction, and it’s heavy, and it’s unwieldy. And I spent until I basically died at the window, and the time elapsed trying to lift the damn thing up.

And all I had to do was collect myself, pull it back six inches. Lift it and chuck it through the window. But I’d never practiced that.

And so that cost me getting hired or moving forward in the hiring process in 96.

When I was looking at the job, a lot of white men would say, well, you’re a white guy, you’re never going to get hired, even though almost every class is predominantly white men.

My low placement on the hiring list was not because I’m a white male being discriminated against but because my nerdy ass overthought the basic literacy test that the city gave us.

I was in the convention center with about a thousand people taking this test and I could not believe that the question was that poorly written. And I had almost a psychotic breakdown trying to decipher what they meant.

And this is like an eighth grade reading level they are testing for. But I was going there’s no like this doesn’t make sense. And so I got so spun out that I answered wrong.

And so and the points are that tight or at that point they were that tight that one wrong answer on the reading comprehension probably dropped me 30 spots. And it’s a matter of I mean essentially a matter of luck.

Like I could reapply for my position in Minneapolis now with 23 years on with the experiences I have with my promotions.

And really the base the base things that the city is looking for is do I qualify as a protected class member and am I a military veteran? Like other previous stuff really doesn’t get that much weight.

And the city because it’s expensive to run a test process, they will hold a list for 2 to 6 years, 2 to 7 years.

I became unglued during that, and that cost me, well, arguably that cost me, I mean, I was in the fourth class of four groups of 30, and everything is really tightly done by seniority.

And so, you know, it was a good humbling lesson in terms of I out-thought myself, and I should have known that the city wasn’t asking me for like upper level language tricks.

They were just basically asking, can I read and understand a badly written English sentence?

That small mistake Jeremy makes on the test bothers him for a long time. And being put that low on the hiring list means he’s going to have to wait a long time for that lottery ticket to be pulled.

It’s the year 2000 when Jeremy is finally hired on as a bonafide firefighter.

My first six months, I was just trying to figure out how to get my gear on, get on the rig quickly. It’s this immersion in emergency response.

While I was learning, there was so much, especially back then, that was kind of leftover from the post-Vietnam era, 70s and 80s, still very paramilitary, very macho, very, like it was still a pretty brutal social environment.

And so, behaviors and cultural wars were inculcated through just bullying and being hard asses, because the idea is that that’s how you’re, like if they’re hard to me in the station as a rookie, that’s how I look, like they can know that I’ll be able

to handle myself out of fire, which none of which is true. It’s not science, it’s just, mostly leads to more people faking it nervously, because they don’t want to look bad.

So my first several years, I was kind of in the wilderness trying to, like trying to make sense of what seemed to me not to make sense here versus what also felt as if there were other ways through.

You know, I would ask around here, but at first I was too junior, no one took me seriously. And then I was a young captain, I didn’t know anything.

And then it was only really, I think when I did well on the chiefs test, that suddenly people are like, oh, he must know something. I’m like, I’m still the same ornery mother fucker I’ve always been.

You all just mistakenly didn’t pay attention to me when you could have, and now you have to, because I outrank you.

So this is like a kitchen you guys have.

That’s a nice kitchen too.

You got a whole cast iron. Being at a fire station is kind of weird. I didn’t realize there was a really nice kitchen.

There’s a gym. There’s a flat screen TV. And while I’m there, I count about three firefighters that are walking around doing various things, getting coffee, making food.

It’s a lot quieter than I thought it would be. But at the same time, there’s a lot more going on than I thought. So this is normal.

You, like, if you were on, you’re not on, you’re not working right now, right, for the record.

Currently, I’m off hurt, but ordinarily, I would have come in yesterday morning at around 7, put my equipment on the rig, relieve the other captain. And then it’s basically my crew and my shift or my everything that happens is under us.

So the cleaning, the cooking, the eating, napping, the training, station duties, paperwork, everything that happens during our shift as a captain, I’m responsible for.

Beginning of 1900s, you basically would go to work for a month and have one day to go home, check the chickens and the kids, breed more chickens and kids, and then go back to work.

And that is kind of for whatever reason, we still largely do 24-hour shifts. Almost across the country, we should get away from this. You know, that we’ve, that, for whatever reason, there’s not a day shift and a night shift.

There’s just, it’s a 24-hour shift. Some places, like we have, one of our crews does a 48-hour shift, and then the other two do 24-hour shifts.

So we split our week in six days, which means my in-laws have never been able to figure out when I’m working and when I’m not. So it’s not that I work every Monday and Wednesday.

One week, if I work Monday and Wednesday, the next week I’d work Sunday, Tuesday, the following week, Saturday, Monday. So it’s constantly moving backwards.

So you guys can work out in the fire station?

Get paid to eat, sleep, work out, watch TV.

And save people.

And then, yeah, and that’s kind of the, you know, it used to be kind of a quasi-military, paramilitary, and it was kind of regimented. And a lot of that, you know, was a really kind of intense work ethic and kind of really intense social policing.

But we’re also now realizing that, you know, being kind of stoic and hard-bitten doesn’t really get us anywhere, that bottling up our feelings doesn’t get us anywhere.

So the raft of social, you know, dysfunctions, alcoholism, drug addiction, being abusive, divorced, like all that stuff that used to be part of being this job and with police, those aren’t, they don’t necessarily need to happen and they aren’t

productive. And so looking at, trying to look at the ways that we can shift our culture within the fact that the certain type of people are often drawn to this job.

So working out during the day we’ve shown is better than being sedentary because we’re not fighting a dozen fires a day.

So this job where they say, you’re a firefighter, here’s the cool gear, here’s the iconic rig, here’s the big station, if you don’t do the right thing you’re gonna die, don’t fuck up.

But meanwhile, while you’re waiting to get this skill, the angel St. Florian to come in and bestow firefighter knowledge on you, you’re nervously waiting.

And then you’re going on medical call after medical call after car wreck, after maybe the alarms we saw earlier that are just someone burnt food or someone had too much steam from their shower or it’s humid.

And so you’re not really getting hands-on training in a job that requires hands-on training. Right. And so I think that disconnect sets up a lot of people in the emergency response professions to have a constant like dissonance.

You know, I’ve pulled a couple people out of fires, but I’ve saved a whole lot more lives doing the EMT portion of the job. And that’s the part that if I were inclined, I would think that’s just the distraction. I’m a fireman.

I have to go put out fires. But we don’t do it.

I respect this job a lot because to me it’s like there’s nothing really you can be upset about with it.

That’s why I like it. That’s why it’s like it speaks to the same sort of like energy that I had, which is trying to make shit better, you know.

And at the same time, because of I think the kind of being cloistered for 24-48 hours at a time and kind of this hermetic social culture, the amount of griping is legendary.

Like the degree and extent of people’s petty pissing matches and griping and complaining is stunning. And but I think that’s just a, you know, it’s a human factor, but in a job where you’ve got 24 hours to formulate your list of grievances.

And you know, the fact that we are getting paid, we have health insurance and people treat us well and all that.

A lot of people, like they buy their own hype and that leads either to risky behaviors on fire scenes, crappy treatment of people in public because they forget that that is the essence of our job.

You know, or at the station, it leads to people treating other people, you know, like shit because that’s what happened to them. Like just like the pecking order and the hierarchy and all that.

So it’s really easy to miss the fact that like, that we benefit from the public goodwill because we’ve earned it and it’s not permanent, right?

So that if we, like, if we treat people poorly, if we get caught on film doing something, we are then accountable for what all firefighters do, kind of. But yeah, I mean, we generally like to be in charge of ourselves.

It’s a bunch of grown up man boys and, you know, man girls, baby girls, you know, or whatever. It’s youth. Oh yeah, woman girls, like, again, another place where language fails us, patriarchy.

That, that boy fire ladies is my, my, is the politically useful term. But we’re just grown up kids. Like, you know, that, that how much the job is ridiculous fun.

And it’s not when we’re not in spite of all the hard stuff, it’s kind of because of all the hard stuff.

And so it’s a lot of like, kind of Tom Sawyers and Nancy Drew, like people who like to solve stuff and are clever, but then also like to generally like, we’re not cops, like we’re, it makes it easier to deal with the people we deal with, because if I

don’t have a really intense sense of what’s right or wrong, when I’m dealing with somebody who is just stealing a car and drove into a wall, I don’t, I don’t moralize them while I’m helping them out. Right?

Like there’s, and that’s what I was saying before, it’s like, it’s just like, it’s an insouciant love of fuckery. Like humans make horrible decisions. You see the end results of the American kind of white supremacist machine.

You see the end result of this generations of sociological imbalance. And you see it in the form of this person who made these decisions to bring us all to this one point.

And if you’re going to be reductive or simplistic, it’s because that person is bad or flawed. And then you realize, well, we’re all flawed.

And so it’s looking at how, like, being present in the moment, treating them with respect, non-judgmentally being neutral. Even in your head, you’re like, you just, you know, you just drunk drove and you hurt your kids. Fuck you.

But that lecture doesn’t need to happen, right? But then you come back and it really can reinforce, like, both the best and the worst in people.

But unfortunately, even if we’re not, as a police charged with prosecuting or arresting people, prosecuting, you know, or yeah, arresting people or interrupting, you know, the consequences for bad decisions, we still see that.

And it’s hard when you see people smoking around their kids and the kids have breathing issues. It’s hard not to, you know, you see people drunk driving and the consequences of that. You see the violence, you know, you see all that stuff.

And it’s hard not to to get fed up with people’s very selfish or oblivious human decisions. So it’s an existential crisis. Like think about like what we think of police doing.

And you look at the statistics and and they are they remain. And we are also reactionary.

They you know, they’re not like they’re the notion of what you’re doing in terms of law and order in terms of what it’s so it’s largely social work without actual training.

Like the people we go to see on the streets who are struggling, who are having mental crisis, emotional crisis, health crises, like really often all it like all we can offer is kind of human connection, human compassion, being present with somebody

and help them get somewhere else. But most of us know that the ED, the emergency department, the ER, isn’t going to fix someone’s chronic mental health issue or crisis. And we don’t have this, nothing’s in place in the larger system.

We ourselves as police officers, as paramedics, as firefighters, can’t change that.

We just have to keep showing up and cleaning up and hoping that some financial miracle happens so that the hospitals and the insurance companies take a better approach to the public’s health.

People are bringing up a wide range of things to shape who they are and how they see the world. All we know is that an immigrant family’s smoke detector was beeping and they called 911 because that’s what they were told to do.

It’s two in the morning, they are worried that their house is on fire. It’s not on fire. And so we’re like, you know, you woke us up.

And this is also the fifth one we’ve been in the neighborhood in the course of a shift. So that wears on us. And so that ability to kind of not judge people, not take it personally and be neutral.

And so that leads to a degree of like insouciant not giving a fuckness. Because you, like they went to a guy who was smoking meth yesterday and one of the byproducts of smoking meth is a raspy throat and a high blood, a high pulse.

So then he thought his heart was exploding. We see lots and lots of people who have been smoking meth or crack who think their hearts are exploding. Like because they don’t have a warning label on the package.

But so we’re looking at those like, dude, your highest… Yeah, yeah, like there’s no, like they haven’t got the label on it yet. So you’re like, yeah, you smoked.

This is, this is direct. So for us, I think, and whether that’s, you know, we go on a gas leak, I smell a fire, smoke in a house. Our job is to parse off all the extraneous factors and get to the thing of what is actually happening.

So we walk in, you know, someone says, well, I ate peanut butter. I did this and that. Like because we’re not that skilled, like firefighters are not that highly trained.

We’re not like paramedics. We’re not like doctors or nurses, anything like that.

We get really good, if we’re doing the job right, of reading people and kind of having a really sharp situational awareness, a clarity of what is actually mattering here.

The paramedics don’t have our freedom to interpret because they have a higher liability standard, they’re trained to a higher level, and they basically are pressured to transport everybody.

So, and I look at it now at this point of seeing, like knowing that they are trapped in a health care, like they’re trapped in a tough pattern where they have to, they feel they have to transport everybody so they don’t get sued.

They transport people who don’t need or don’t really want to be transported because the result is if someone comes back later and says, you neglected me, that was abandonment, they’re going to get sued in there and the hospital isn’t going to back

them. Right. Like it’s the Good Samaritan thing. Right.

I’m like we’re just like I’m just a firefighter. I have no ability to change how the system works. But that is the thing that drives like the basically fear of liability and the for-profit hospitals drive so much of the 911 system.

So then we keep getting called and the paramedics get called and the police get called to things that are largely social systems failures.

Yeah. Yeah. My my grandmother, she she died recently.

But when we tried to get her into like long-term care, basically she was starting to fall. Every day she was 90. And my dad couldn’t take care of her anymore.

His wife is a 35 year nurse, retired nurse, whatever Air Force. So what what we did was my dad kept taking her into the doctor, kept taking her to see the neurologist. They can’t get a bed for her.

They can’t get her in. So one day he’s like, you know what we’re gonna do? Next time she falls, we’re gonna call the ambulance.

Cause that way we know she’s going straight to the emergency room, blah, blah, blah. And so it happened and we did get her admitted. And we did get things done.

And she is an immigrant, can’t speak English and whatever. So to your point, it’s like, yeah, there are a lot of people kind of misuse the system or they learn that they can’t use the system the way it should be.

So they’re just like, you know what, I’m going to do this. I don’t know about calling for my daughter scraping her knee. She’s going to have to figure that shit out.

Right.

Well, but a lot of new parents, young parents, like that’s the thing. I don’t fault people for the concern, right? But they don’t understand that they’re calling because 911 is the only option to call.

And 911 has no option but to send us because everyone’s worried about getting sued. I expect this to be done by the TV. I’ll work on it.

So that is that 5 beep.

5, 17, 5, 3, 2, commercial fire alarm, 3, 0, 4, 5, 7, 1, 1, 10.

So that’s a fire call being dispatched. Throughout our conversation, the quieter ones have been radio calls around the city. But when it’s us specifically, the lights click on and all the speakers in every room pop on.

Okay, so what do you do right now?

Not you personally.

What these cats are going to do? Well, we can come and watch them. They’re going to go get to us.

Yeah, I’m just not going to get in you guys’ way, but this is…

I live for this shit. This is exactly what I wanted to… Oh, my God.

Yeah, this is cool, man. Holy shit. I just don’t want to get in someone’s way and somebody dies or something.

I mean, it’s been a couple of years, but I forget people love it.

My dad and his girlfriend were just visiting.

She’s never been to a firehouse.

We put her on the rig.

Seventy-six years old, happy as a clam.

Wow. OK.

They also said it’s a hell of a hose load that you guys got going. Professionals.

So right now, we’re standing back in a safe distance, right, away from Engine 17, right?

Yep.

It’s the iconic official fire truck of this station. Yeah.

And then the chief’s about to call. It’s a commercial fire alarm, which means it could be anything from burnt food, steam from a shower. No smoke is reported.

And so a majority of our fire calls are just to investigate an alarm being tripped.

So when, you know, you drive past a, you know, I said before, the most fire houses that have been built in the past 30 years are generally single station, like single story, because people kept breaking their legs in the middle of the night sliding

the poles. But there’s still huge buildings and you walk past the outside of one and assume, you know, there’s 40 strapping men and women and they’re ready to rip the shit out of a fire. And really, they’re often three of us.

In our case, we have three on our side. And now with the rescue rig temporarily quartered here, we have another four people on that rig. And it’s, you know, in our living area, it gets a little confined quarters.

But yes, we’ve got all the lockers for our gear and for the crews who are off that day’s gear. They have to be tall because of the size of the rigs. Everything out here, everything is loud.

I mean, the job is nothing but like hard angles and noise.

And then after the riots, when I was coming up with stuff to do during COVID, since there’s so many, you know, so many of the traditional fire, you know, like fire mascots are a bull, the devil, a stallion, a skeleton, you know, a ripshit macho

stuff, I was like, what’s going to be the best one? So we went with a sparkly, sparkliest unicorn you could find. And it is an awesome litmus test because kids love it. Most people think it’s a hoot.

And then among my coworkers, most of them just kind of chuckle.

But the, you know, but the dudes who are threatened by having a unicorn on their shirt, because they think that that means their truck might get taken away and they aren’t, macho enough, they’ve already failed the test.

So I sold a bunch of shirts that I made, kind of raised money for a couple of different local groups. It’s just a donation. So there are a lot of them going out.

And we, that is our official logo. So it’s on our uniform shirts. It is pretty dope.

And it does. And I was saying before, like, I like, Yeah, so one of my coworkers got really, really, really, really, really into unicorns. So all the unicorns around the station, you can see if you look there, a shit ton of them, he’s got hidden.

He was worried that the sparkly one wasn’t going to pass, that it wouldn’t be approved. So because it was going to be a little too sparkly.

So he basically took like the Denver Broncos, Angry Horse Mascot, stuck a rainbow on its mane and stuck a cone on its head. So that’s our like, that’s our alternate version.

So when they get in the truck, the other thing I noticed is like, you’re not in full on riot gear.

I don’t know what this is. The turnout gear. We can come out of it.

It’s hot as shit out here. They were pretty sure that the address was right close to the other, because there were three rigs sent, plus the chief. Two engine companies in a truck.

The closer engine was going to get there first. And so they were putting the rest of their gear on as they got on the rig.

But a good example of kind of the habitual casualness that can bite you in the ass is we get so used to things being false alarms.

We get used to things not being emergencies because there’s such a paradoxical adrenaline surge when the lights pop on, your sound asleep in the middle of the night pop on, you hear the five beeps of a fire call.

You’re thinking, oh my God, it’s a fire. Let’s get there rushing. And then it’s nothing.

And so you get these adrenaline surges and let downs. And so after a while you hear an address and say, we’ve had 30 false alarms at that high rise. It’s going to be the 31st.

And the idea is we’re supposed to be able to respond quickly and adapt quickly. But I’ve been with captains when I was in the back seat, who were always casual. And then we rolled up on something that was way more than…

Crazy fire. It was way more than… And they were flat footed and they were behind.

And it’s like seconds count and also having a presence of mind. As I said, you have to slough off all the extraneous and focus. And so middle of the night, you pull up on something and you didn’t expect it to be much.

You have to be like, okay, there are people trapped inside that house. The whole front of the house is on fire. The neighbors are screaming.

The neighbor’s house to the south is at risk. I’ve got to wake the fuck up and figure out a plan. And then radio it to the world coherently.

And that’s where all the expectation of the public and the mythos of the firefighters is that we’re unflappable. We’ve seen it all. We’ve done it all.

But the reality of it is the number of fires has shrunk pretty much every year since the 70s, thanks to a lot of successful arsons in the 80s and smoke detectors. We’ve got much better fire safety. And so now you’ll burn your food cooking.

The smoke detector will let you know you put it out. It used to be the stove would catch fire, then the kitchen would catch fire. So we would have a lot more fires.

And so it’s an existential crisis for the fire service that we’re firefighters, but we don’t fight that many fires.

And then in the meantime, the calls for service, the emergency response aspect of the job has gone up, so that our calls for service, what we do, any of the 911 calls, it gets dumped on us because Dispatch really only has 3 people on, or 4 people on

speed dial, police, paramedics, fire department, and then city workers. So we get called for lots of miscellaneous stuff. And so we’re supposed to, you know, kind of handle everything with aplomb, not really get rattled, not get bothered.

And then also be kind of like boy and girl scouts able to problem solve in the moment. We’ll see you downstairs.

Yeah, let’s do it. Wow, these fire station batteries are way, way better than the quote unquote heavy duty, super duty, off brand corner store batteries.

So.

I’ve had a couple of injuries in the past couple of years. One was, one was, actually Bob, who you didn’t meet. Bob and I, I was pulling somebody out of a fire.

Bob tried to help me. He fell through the floor, cracked his leg. And then as Bob fell, I fell and kind of wrenched my shoulder.

Then about the next shift I worked, I was lifting somebody up off the floor, a person who had passed out on the sidewalk. As I was lifting him, my shoulder just went flop, and popped out, you know.

So, but then the one I, like I’m off right now with a knee injury from carrying an overdose person on the snow, and he collapsed on the ice, and he took me out.

And then I heard it, you know, three months later, carrying bags, threw up basically a lot of homeless encampments. So there’s a lot of detritus on the ground, and I misstepped.

So, so much of our work is literally lifting people. We’re body conveyors. We move people through their houses.

You’re like when your grandmother wasn’t doing well, if you’d called 911, up there, Engine 14, Engine 20, or Ladder 10 would have shown up and figured out how to get her, no matter whether she’s big or small, from the upstairs, down the stairs,

around the corners, through the house, out to the ambulance. That’s what we are like that level of problem-solving. At this point with 23 years on and since 2007 as a captain, as a supervisor, my job is to figure that stuff out.

With a lot of the paramedics, a lot of them are new because they’ve had so much turnover. They’ve got more training than I do, but they don’t have practical experience.

I can see what are going to be the main problems of a call that don’t require a defibrillator, don’t require them injecting drugs. It’s literally just physics. It’s human behavior and physics.

That’s one of the benefits that a lot of us get really good at, is saying, okay, holistically, what does this situation need? But going back to this stuff, it’s like stretching out, eating better.

It used to be you would have soggy veggies from a can, some charred white meat, and iceberg lettuce were the meals. I was a vegetarian for my first several years. I almost killed five people with the name tofu before they even tried it.

Then I just put some barbecue sauce on it. They just thought it was mushy meat. There have been a lot of good cultural things.

It doesn’t change the fact that what we’re doing doesn’t change. So we have to figure out ways to handle the realities of the job, and there aren’t any real life hacks for dealing with other people’s suffering. Right.

You got to lift the weight.

You got to lift the weight.

You got to figure out how to do stuff. But you also got to figure out how to stay sane and maintain compassion.

So they’re back?

Oh, they’re back. It was not a big blaze.

Okay.

Wow. And, you know, as you can see, like, this is kind of our home for 24, 48 hours.

What are the hardest aspects of this job?

I mean, I think on one hand, you have a workforce of people who are generally, like, independent, oppositional, defiant, risk takers. So we all think we know better, right? So I’m putting myself squarely in a, in a, in a viable or real tradition.

And I think we always run, you know, there’s always kind of a tension between us and the stations versus the administration, versus the city.

And so there’s also a tension of, like, once you promote up, don’t lose, you know, don’t forget where you came from. But a lot of it’s because what we deal with here is often just interpersonal stuff or petty stuff.

And then also when you get, when they further you move up, you also realize that making change is difficult because of civil service rules, because of HR rules, because of city state rules, because of union issues. And so there’s a lot of impasse.

I will say that one example would be all the talk now about people with emotional or mental crises on the streets, right? So very few of us have social work degrees or any social sociology training.

It’s really what we see on the job and what we learn from it. So there are a lot of really good, you know, police officers, medics, firefighters, who just go with the flow.

We, because we don’t have to arrest or transport, we don’t have to enforce the laws. We are freer as firefighters to have kind of a more holistic approach. And a lot of my coworkers are great.

I mean, you’re just awesome dealing with people. We are kind of, we are the ones who are never non-plus. We’re always plussed, right?

We’re like, you’re drunk, you’re high, you’re talking to a goldfish, fucking A right, we’re fine. And there are a lot of police officers who are pretty good at handling that.

But because their mentality has always been solve this problem, deal with this. They don’t have the same freedom we have to be fluid or unbothered by stuff. And then a lot of my co-workers are kind of more military or much more of an us versus them.

Long before the death of George Floyd or the killing of George Floyd, and then the aftermath, and then certainly since 2020, there’s been more acute awareness of interactions with the public.

What I maintain has not really been understood is we emergency responders, badged people, we’re still the default, right? So someone sees somebody licking the street, passed out, talking to a lamppost, bleeding, they call 911.

911 sends us, dispatch sends us. If we, you know, they have an algorithm that they go through asking questions. If anything causes a red flag in their thing, they’ll say send police because we don’t know what it is.

So we’ve already started a crisis and the potential for an aggressive response or a problematic response.

And it could be someone has, is having a seizure, someone is a diabetic, it’s, you know, someone with Alzheimer’s who’s turned around, someone on, you know, withdrawing from drugs, somebody on drugs, somebody drunk, like not having a mental, like

there are so many things that could be causing someone to act divergently from a baseline quote normal. And someone calling in doesn’t intend to have the person violently taken off the street.

We show up, you know, and so like where the BCR is great, but they’ve been kind of understaffed. And I wanted, like, I thought it would be great if we trained with the behavioral crisis response team so that we have better skills to deescalate.

Because generally, because we don’t have guns and we don’t have ambulance, like we don’t have any choice, like we don’t have the paramedics have sedatives, they have handcuffs, police have handcuffs and all the rest.

And they have a squad car or an ambulance. We don’t have any of that stuff. So we generally are pretty good at just being neutral with people.

So it’s a learned skill to kind of be chill. But when I was like, what we were taught was kind of be chill and then then dogpile somebody or hogpile somebody. Just like try to talk them down, if not everyone.

And then it’s all on us. There’s nothing in our SOPs, our procedures that say you’re supposed to bum rush somebody. You know, it’s like it was a safety thing.

And so you look at there are so many cases across the country, but in this state, where somebody who’s experiencing any sort of altered mentation was engaged from a position of, sir, we were called to help, what’s going on?

And if the person is oppositional, is defiant, is incoherent, sir, I need you to sit down, I’m talking to you. And then it escalates. You know, sir, sit there, sir, come back.

Because once we’ve shown up, we’re responsible. So if they run into traffic, that’s on us. Sir, I need you to sit down.

Sir, we’re trying to help. Sir, stop fighting. Sir, get up.

And then it piles on. And so I frankly put the killing of George Floyd into that situation where the responding officers failed to recognize that he was in a crisis. And you can say yes through cultural biases, through blindness, through habituation.

You had two very rookie cops who were afraid to fail the withering gaze of their supervisor, the training officer. They missed him saying from the very beginning, I can’t breathe. We’ve had so many people who were in altermentation.

So they find out later their drugs in the system. Fine. But that is not a death sentence.

And we should expect as responders that people we encounter are going to be a wide range of people. So if I show up and someone’s not making sense, rather than thinking, oh, I got to, I got to fucking sit this person down.

Like, oh, now I get to figure out what’s going on with them. And here’s the thing, we don’t have many choices.

And if we’re not going to hogpile somebody and they’re in crisis, like even holding them down for their own safety can lead to respiratory arrest, can lead to acidosis, can lead to respiratory or cardiac failure.

So even when we’re not, like, not violent with somebody, stopping them from running away or flailing or running their heads through a brick wall, like doing what we’re trying to do, if we don’t have a sedative, we don’t have a way to calm them down,

even just flopping them on to an ambulance, on to a cot and tying them down, that can lead to fatal medical condition. And then they die. And afterwards, it has been whitewashed, if you will, by the coroner’s reports for years.

There are so many dead people who died because responders misunderstood and did not have the training or the skills to recognize this. And I’m not putting this on any of the responders. I’m saying it is a structural issue.

So this is, when you get to what I’m feeling and where the failure is, is that is a systemic and structural issue. And yet there’s absolutely individual bias. I’ve got co-workers who are just are shitty with people.

You know, I’ve had people, you know, I have my crew members come back and say, yeah, I worked with so-and-so, boy, that was horrible. You know, he was just an asshole to this person.

Like took personally the fact that the homeless person was having a hard day or that the person who was off his or her meds was acting weird. Like our gift in this job is to try to be present and kind to people.

And not take their shit personally and recognize that we get to go home to our beds while they are stuck in their torment. And so that, but it’s hard because being present means you open up your heart to them.

And if what we see over and over again is the end results of massive systemic problems, it’s really, it can break your heart. And so you have to find that way of not burning out and not putting up too many walls and becoming callous.

Like, you know, people often ask like, what’s the worst thing you’ve seen? Or you all don’t do this and that.

And, you know, I got hurt the beginning of June, the first shift I was off, the crews here caught the aftermath of that, the five young women who were killed by the reckless driver.

Right, so, and three of the people working here are classmates of mine, so they all have 23 years and two of them had 20 and 21 years and Tracy has 24 years. Every single one of them said that was the worst thing they’ve ever seen.

And so for us to be able to say, as a group, you know, as a consensus, it was the worst call. Like, the bag of memories that I have, and it doesn’t, they don’t bother me, but they’re real, like that’s the problem.

It’s like, I’m not haunted by them, but they are fucking areal. And so for someone who’s glib or someone who’s dismissive, that’s where the spikes come out, you know?

And it’s kind of like, I will open your fucking eyes and pour the screams, the sorrow, the blood, the broken bones, the ruined lives. I will fucking drown you with them because you’re being a stupid fuck and you’re being insensitive.

It takes Jeremy until 2018, nearly 20 years into his career, to realize that this job of his had caused him trauma.

He was asked to speak on a panel about resilience, along with the panelists who had survived sexual assault and one who had survived the collapse of the 35W bridge into the Mississippi River.

And at the time I said, yeah, I don’t really know why I’m here. Like I’m just kind of trauma adjacent. And then as it turned out, about two weeks later, I participated in a sleep and resilience study.

Some people that you were doing and it’s about six of us firefighters were talking. And I realized that where for years people talked about PTSD. You know, you have a bad call and it’s generally a dead baby or a dying baby who then is dead.

But you go to some call that haunts you. And that’s, you know, in the literature I’d read, you know, like, and the story is it’s that one bad call you’re haunting. And I was like, wait a second.

I’m not haunted by any single dead baby, but I’ve had multiple dead babies. And I was like, oh, this is a career with nothing but trauma. And you store it up and you store it up.

And there’s not really a productive or healthy way to get rid of it. And you have to keep coming to work.

That’s really what I’ve spent in the past four years, five years now really working on is looking at all the ways that we carry this concept of who we are and how that dissonance leads to a Trojan horse of trauma.

So that when you asked me like in those first six months, I was like, no, but when I’ve and I’m like I’m like I’ve done some peer counselor training for specifically for the fire service.

But most a lot of the people will talk and say, you know, I’m just haunted. We went to that car crash. I just I just I wish I could have done something or I feel I blame myself for not having been able to do more.

And I’m like, were you driving the car that hit them? You weren’t. You got called when you got called.

You showed up when it already happened. It already happened. But I think because of this this.

Mythos of being firefighters, being heroes, being able to solve things, people buy into that, and that’s what it looks like. So our our turnout gear, all the big bulky gear, becomes kind of emblematic, but it’s also an armor.

But there are a lot of people in there who feel like frauds. It’s like this sense of I’m trying to be this thing.

That thing is a hero, which is not a title Jeremy would use for himself, but it is one that’s been foisted upon him and his colleagues and plenty of other professions. It’s a title we give, of course, as a compliment.

Heroes are not like the rest of us who are so small and helpless and in need of saving. Heroes are the ones we turn to to save us, to fix things. Heroes are the ultimate grownups in a world full of children.

And there is something lonely about that and something dehumanizing too. The cost of being a hero is evident in every superhero story. Batman can never be truly known by any of the women he falls in love with.

The Hulk is destined to wander the earth alone. Spider-Man is cursed in every universe to lose the people that he loves the most.

If the title and the responsibility is too much even for fictional heroes, imagine what it’s like for the ones in the real world. In the early days of the pandemic, we launched a lot of job titles up to hero status.

Doctors, nurses, teachers, front line workers. I’m going off the top of my head here and I am not disparaging any of that good work. I participated in it.

I liked videos of people banging pots and pans at night to let these people know wherever they were and whoever they were saving that we saw them, that we appreciated them.

But underneath every hero, from your favorite nurse to Spider-Man, is really just a person. A person who is going to work and doing their job.

And we don’t really get training, we don’t get to talk about how we’re supposed to deal with it, but many of the people I’ve talked to who’ve had traumatic issues, they really focus on the sense that I feel like a failure, like I should have done

more. And I’m like, but that’s, like I’m mad at myself when I fuck up. Like if I mess up on a call, if I misread somebody, I beat the shit out of myself on it. And then I come back and I learn from it and I keep going.

But I really am quite clear about human behavior and gravity, right? So in biology, like we have such a culture of denial. So I come and see your grandmother on her way down.

The family loves their grandmother. They want her to be just as she is. She keeps going to the hospital.

She’s risking getting sepsis, MRSA, C diff, pneumonia. There’s nothing to solve dying. We’re all going to die.

But the hospitals, the medical system keeps sending her home. Maybe she gets a different infection. Maybe she’s not recovering.

You, the family, are hung up on, I want my beloved granny to be the way she’s always been. I take one look at her and saying, this human being is dying. She’s running out of daylight.

I’m not necessarily going to be able to have that conversation with you because you all are in a paradigm, a framework where she’s alive and well. I take one look at her and say, she’s dying.

Right, I will desecrate a corpse because the family couldn’t bring themselves to do a DNR, DNI, because the doctor couldn’t bring him or herself to be honest with the family.

So that’s the stuff where it either breaks your heart or you understand the human circus of it all and get jaded but still find a way to stay present.

I’m Nora McInerny. This is Terrible Thanks For Asking. Jeremy Norton is a Minneapolis firefighter and the author of the new memoir, Trauma Sponges, Dispatches From The Scarred Heart of Emergency Response.

This is Jeremy’s first book. It is out with a small press, the University of Minnesota Press, and we will link to it in our show description because Jeremy has been a part of our Terrible Thanks For Asking community for years since the beginning.

And he wrote something really beautiful and something that we think that you would really, really like. Terrible Thanks For Asking is a production of Feelings & Co. We are an independent podcast company.

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