The Origin Story

The first time you watch a CPR end in death, the hard part is not only what happened on scene. It is the ride back, the silence, and the moment you realize nobody taught you where to put any of it.

I’m Jake, a firefighter paramedic with 16 years in fire and EMS, and Call Residue starts with the story I still remember from being a brand-new volunteer at 25. I talk about why first responders lean on dark humor, why the culture pushes us to compartmentalize, and how that “keep moving” mindset can quietly turn into PTSD, burnout, and addiction. I also share parts of my own sobriety and recovery, plus the role faith has played for me, not as a performance but as one of the ways I’ve stayed upright.

We get into what it feels like when the job follows you home: the calls you cannot forget, the physical stress your body stores, and the reality of shift work and decompression. I also explain why I’m making this show for the person who is ten years in and falling apart, for the rookie who still thinks the job will look like TV, and for the spouse or family member who senses the weight but cannot see it.

If you want an honest podcast about firefighter life, paramedic work, first responder mental health, and what it takes to keep showing up, start here. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people who feel alone can find the conversation.

Transcript

The First Death On A Call

Who I Am Behind The Pager

Why This Podcast Exists

How I Chose Fire And EMS

A Chief Says Do Not Play God

The Calls That Never Leave

Decompression And Job Culture

Where We Go From Here

Closing And A Share Request

SPEAKER_00 0:16

You know, you spend enough years uh uh in this job, and it leaves something on you. Not always visible, not always something you can name, but it's there. I'm Jake. I'm a firefighter paramedic, and this is Cult Residue. It's a podcast about what this life actually looks like. The calls you carry home, the stuff nobody briefs you on at the academy, the ugly, the heavy, and sometimes the beautiful. Let's get to it. So the first call I ever ran where somebody died, I was 25 years old and a brand new volunteer. Didn't have my EMT, didn't have my firefighter one. I had just gotten a pager, and I was very, very excited to get to helping people. We get toned out to a CPR in progress. I remember it vividly. We arrived on scene and did everything we could for this patient. This patient ended up dying. I remember sitting in the back of the engine going back to the station, and nobody had talked. Someone had said a joke at one point. People laughed, and I thought that was very weird. Turns out that's just the job. You learn to carry it and keep moving. I'm still learning that 16 years later. Anyway, welcome to the show. And why should you care about anything that I have to say? Even I don't care what I have to say. But that's a fair question. Here's the short version. I've been in fire and EMS for 16 years. Started as a volunteer, moved to private EMS, became career, have been a paramedic for nine, going on 10 years. I work a rotating shift schedule of a 4896, but I've also worked a 24 on, three off, or a modified Detroit. And everyone who's listening knows that all of those make it a wonder of why my family still wants to hang out with me. And I'm very, very blessed to have that family. I'm in recovery. I've been sober for eight and a half years, and that is part of the story. It's not the whole story, it's gonna be in there, and we'll talk about it at some point. But right now, you're just getting to know me. I'm also a person of faith. That's gonna come up too, not in a preachy way. It's just part of my story. Faith has been a part of how I survived this job, and I am not gonna leave it out. So that's me, a paramedic, a husband, a dad, a guy in recovery, and apparently now a podcast host. So why a podcast? Why now? Honestly, it's because I spent too long not talking about this, keeping it quiet, and I've seen too many of my friends, my colleagues, succumb to the traumas. People don't like to hear what we have to say. I once had a s a therapist that told me that I could not share the stuff that I saw to her because it was too much. The culture of this job as a whole is to compartmentalize. Don't talk about it. Use your dark humor to get through it. You go home, you decompress. Some use things we'll talk about, some to excess. I was one of those. For a while it works until it doesn't. Again, I've lost guys in this field, not on calls, but people that I worked with and that I cared about really, really deeply. People that I looked up to, people that once pulled me from the edge. And I got tired of watching it happen. So this is me saying something. This show is for the person who's been on the job ten years and is quietly falling apart and doesn't know how to ask for help. It's for the family member who loves the first responder but has no idea what they're actually carrying home. It's for the rookie that just got the job of their wildest dreams and has no idea what they're about to step into and the difficulties that they're going to have to face. And honestly, it's for me because talking about this stuff out loud is how I stay upright. So, how did I get here? How did I choose this career? One of my earliest memories is seeing my father step out of the back of an ambulance while he was training to be a charge nurse at a hospital in California where we had lived. I was three years old. We were dropping something off, probably cookies that mom had made. And he was helping somebody, and I said, I'm gonna do that someday. After we moved up here from California to visit my dad, back then the medics were hospital-based, so I got to talk with all the paramedics, got to hang out in the rigs. In fact, even my sister during her preschool time, I got to be the patient. And I thought I was really cool. I was just a nerd. Still am a nerd, but I started to nerd out. My dad became a volunteer firefighter. I think I was seven at the time. And I remember seeing him train up at the local training tower with the local fire department, and I wanted to be that. That's what I wanted to be. This career was kind of deep within me. I wanted to help people. From an early age, my whole life was I'm gonna grow up, and I told my parents I was gonna be an ambulance. What I meant was I was going to be a paramedic. You know, be the person on rescue 911 and to go and help the one that needed to be saved. I went to college, I joined a fraternity, and I never made the jump. I sometimes wish I did then, because it was still in me. I still wanted to help people. Manage restaurants for a couple of years after graduation, have a degree in alcohol and drug psychology. That'll come up later. And I didn't love it. I wasn't I wasn't into it. So one day I applied to an academy down in Livermore, California. The girl I was dating at the time was living down there. So that was my first step towards heading toward be a firefighter. I then asked around locally and heard I could be a volunteer up here. Didn't have to move to California. So I did that instead. I wanted to stay in Washington, so that's what happened. And that's the start of this whole journey was I got on with a volunteer fire department and I hit the ground running. Fire, fire academy, EMT, got hired with a local private, worked in the city of Seattle, worked North King County, County. It was fun. And in facilities, you're not really first responding, you're staging for things. I thought I was cool then. In the first years of being a volunteer, I spent a lot of time at the fire station trying to get as many calls as possible. The department that I first started with as a volunteer was 300 and something calls a year, but they would come in like blocks of 10. You know, you can go a week of no calls and then 15 calls right in a row within a three or four-day period. Calls on the freeway, calls on the highway, fires, lift assists, car accidents, a lot of motorcycle accidents. Going back to that first CPR. I actually talked with uh one of the chiefs. He had been doing it for like 40 years. I went down to the station and I wanted to wash every single rig, so I did. And then the chief rolled in and I was like, You want me to wash your rig too? And I did. And he washed it with me and he asked how things were going. And I said, How have you done this so long? Because the CPR was still bugging me. It's a weird concept when you do CPR on somebody. Because in the TV shows they come back, you know, and everything's honky-dory. You know, even rescue 911, they never talked about death. They don't talk about Rosk uh, you know, in save rates, they just talk about the ones that they do save. And as a medic, you know that that's pretty far and in between. And now as a medic, I know that the upper GI bleed that was all over me is even more of a frustrating thing for a medic. And here is a new EMT or a new volunteer just doing CPR. I thought I was doing something, and maybe I was. I'm not, I don't remember the details of that call. But I remember feeling like I didn't do enough. And that chief looked at me and said, We don't play God, we do everything we can that we are trained to do. He asked me, Did you do good CPR? I said, Yeah. Did you make sure that that patient received the best care that you knew how to give? I said, Yeah. He said, Sounds to me like you did the best of your abilities. You don't play God, and your higher power is the only one that can decide whether or not it's your time to go. And that stuck with me. The chief's one of my mentors. He's since retired. Maybe we'll have him on the show. Because he loves to talk just as much as me. So but as time goes on, the job becomes a little more taxing mentally and physically. What I expected first year as a volunteer was not the same as my expectations of the first year of being on shift. Going from private EMS to part-time fire at a couple different agencies at the same time. It's it's a big difference. You don't have multiple agencies coming in. You're just one big agency working. Again, it's still car accidents and lift assists and going to people's homes. For me, I always wanted this career. I worked my butt off for this career. I did many interviews, many no's, many, many, many no's. Like 39 nos. And that's just one year. This career is a calling. It's something that you just become passionate about. No one calls 911 when they're having fun. When someone calls 911 and it's a medical need, someone feels that they're extremely in danger. Whether that's grandma's lift assist from the bathroom floor, or that's a tiny newborn that just stopped breathing. It's the same exact response. But in your boots, you get in the rig, and you go to the call. Some of those calls stay with you. I can't remember most of the names that I've picked up off the floor that called me a cute blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy that just would come and save the day for them. I can remember the times of doing infant CPR. I can remember the times of doing CPR and having the mom scream in the back of their 19-year-old that was just ejected from a car. I can remember the screams of officers when their colleague was hit. I remember the screams of the mother as I told her that her child was involved in an accident. Those don't go away. And that's the stuff that we need to talk about. That's the stuff that keeps me up at night. The body keeps the score. There's sometimes I don't even think about it for months, but then all of a sudden I'll get angsty. That's the truth about this career. Don't get me wrong, it is one of the most fulfilling careers in the world to be able to catch a baby being born, being able to help somebody in their home, just being invited into their home. You know, we wear our boots into some of these houses where you see the shoes outside. And you have to be like you have to remind yourself that you are being invited in. You are a guest. Just like when someone comes to your fire station, that is not your fire station. That is their fire station. It is their rig. You are just lucky enough to get to work on. Whether you're a cop, whether you're medic, whether you're an EMT, a firefighter, that is their equipment. And you get to work it. You get to work the shifts, you get to serve them. And I think that's the biggest part about this entire thought of starting this podcast is we are all the same. We got it into it to help people, whether or not it was what we saw on Chicago Fire or on Station 19 or on Night Rescue 911, or for those of us that are a little bit older, emergency, we got in it to help people. In my 16 years, this career I've built, the friends I've built, close relationships with. I mean, I spend more time with my work family than I do my own family. And I'm very, very thankful that my family loves to be around me. And so when I come home, they want to go out with me. I may be tired. I may want another hour and a half of sleep, which sometimes turns into four, let's be honest. And I couldn't be in my position now without my amazing wife, my supportive kids, and my work family. Getting outside yourself and knowing that you're you're doing a great job. One of the things that I learned about myself, I'd always dreamt of working in the same city that I lived in. Being able to go to my kids' soccer practice or basketball or going to different school events. Seeing my kids at school was always a dream. I got to do it for a few years, but that was probably the most taxing on me during that time. I had a 500-yard commute. It was great, but I didn't have time to decompress. It was a different feeling when I first started my career as a fire medic here in Washington State. I had a two-hour commute. I had time to decompress, time to relax. I've become the guy that might say a joke on the way back from a CPR, the dark humor. I've become that person, the person that I thought, well, that was a weird comment. 16 years prior. Just part of the culture. We're just going to push it down and keep on going. Hell, even when I did CPR on the infant, where I was working at the time, needed me to get back in service. The fire guys, though, they were able to decompress. Some of them went home, not us. We had another call to get to. And that's the honest truth. Sometimes it's very, very different when you're on the engine, a ladder, the difference in the split fire EMS world in the particular state that I went to work in. But this is probably the most rewarding career. I literally get to go to work and I feel like I'm not even working. Don't be, don't get me wrong. We work hard, but the amount of sacrifice mentally and physically is something that we don't talk about. And that's what we're going to talk about. So that's episode one. That's who I am and that's where I came from. And where we're headed with this is that we're going to get into the calls that don't leave you. The culture inside the firehouse, the good and the bad, mental health, PTSD, what it actually looks like and feels like to work a job that like this and still be a functioning human being. We're going to talk about addiction and recovery, specifically mine, and have people on that have maybe similar stories to let you know that you're not alone. Because there is a cost to having that, but there is a way out of it. We're going to talk about marriage and the statistics of divorce. I'm one of them. Fatherhood and faith. And we're going to have some guests, people from the fire service, from the recovery world, from the military, from police, doctors, medical. These people have things and they're worth hearing. Life's not TV. It's not a little Facebook following, you know, every scanner app. It's real life. And we're going to dig into it. This isn't polished. This is me just talking. I have no media training whatsoever. I'm random. I have ADHD. I'm not pretending to be anyone I haven't been in the last 16 years on this job. And there's a lot of stuff that I haven't set out yet. So we're going to do it. Thanks for listening. And if it's the first time you're hearing this show, welcome. I'm glad you're here. And I hope you stick around. Well, that's a wrap on this one. If something we talked about hits home, share it with somebody who needs to hear it. You probably already know who that is. New episodes dropped every week. I'm Jake. This is Call Residue. Stay safe out there, and if you're not okay, that's okay too. We'll talk about it.