Firefighting for 25 years went by very quickly and I thank God that I made it out alive. Sometimes when I look back on it I wonder if even if I stepped differently would I be writing this today. For example there was that time where a man was drilling post holes and his boom on his drilling rig got too close to the 13,000 volt hydro line which in turn caused the electricity to arc to the boom and in the process the 2 halves of the hydro lines came down and were buzzing in the long grass near where I was walking with my hoseline. Not to mention that his rig exploded into a massive fireball. Or the time the batteries fell out of the thermal imaging camera and I couldn’t find them right away cause the smoke was so think and it was so hot that it started to melt out helmut visors. There was also that time at 3:13am on Dec 13, 1996 when a car went airborne through our fire hall parking lot and skidded into our flagpole about 4 feet from our building and was fully involved in flames. I mean potential death or near death was literally driving at me, I didn’t even have to leave the station. Then there were medical calls that would make the exorcist appear to be something you could watch before a big slurry of pulled pork. People hacking up lungs and dropping their can cancerous bowels all over the ambulance floor. Working during the sars period was like staring in the movie Virus except with no chem suit just a .49 cent face mask and the big pay cheque but we’d all do it and thought nothing of it. In fact some days you would do the same thing you did at hundreds of other calls and you’d get an envelope in the mail saying that I’m invited to to a lightning bolt ceremony because I was part of the team that day when we actually saved someone from really dying. A lot of calls just mold into one big pile and can only be remembered when a colleague will recant an event and I’ll say I wasn’t at that and then after a few minutes it all comes back like it just happened.