The Glitch: From Firefighter Zen

Everyone has a plan before they get into the ring, then they get hit in the head. — Mike Tyson

Wait! I forgot an important detail of the lifeline exercise. It’s the fine print, it’s called the Glitch. 
A story to explain.

We were paged to a “man down.” A typical call. Dozens and dozens of times a year we respond to “man down” 9-1-1 calls, usually someone hitch-hiking, drunk, stoned or sleeping.

But this time was different. A family out biking. The dad went over a small bump on a bike trail, fell over the handlebars and broke his neck. Just like that. Just like us, at that time he was in his thirties. It happened a couple of miles off the road on a bike trail. We knew from our assessment that it was a dire injury. He had no feeling below his belly button. This type of call is a Trauma Stat, meaning we need to go fast and alert the trauma team at the hospital. Yet, because of the terrain and his injury, it took us almost three hours to slowly carry him out. It took ten of us, so careful, so alert not to slip on the rocks. We would switch out positions every few minutes to keep fresh arms and legs carrying the litter. Our patient stared stoically at the sky. We shaded his eyes and gave him sips of water. We, the firefighters, kept looking at each other. We had the sinking feeling that nothing we or the trauma team could do would change the outcome. At the trailhead, we transferred him to our ambulance and began the slow drive over rutted roads to the hospital. Our paramedic that day drew a line on his belly that demarked where he had sensation and where he had none. She wrote the date and the time by the line. She kept testing all the way, praying that it wouldn’t change for the worst. Arriving at the hospital, the ambulance driver slumped over the steering wheel, exhausted from avoiding every bump on the dirt roads.

Later that evening, two of us went to visit the dad in the ICU. The neurologist — who was a friend — confirmed our fears. She told us he had severed his spinal cord at C3. That is the third vertebrae in the cervical spine — the beginning of the neck. The information network that flows through our bodies is relatively dispersed, except in our necks. There it turns into a compact and complicated information highway, messages to and from the body run through the cervical spinal canal. An injury there can be a disaster.

“He’s a paraplegic now.” The doc whispered. “It will take a while for him to come to grips with all this. Don’t be long.”

She walked briskly away, her long white jacket trailing by her sides.

We went into his room. He was flat on the bed with a big halo head stabilizer holding his head steady. He was staring at the ceiling — there was not much else he could do. He moved his eyes as we came in. Seeing us he whispered, “Just kill me.” Dan and I looked at each other. We talked for a while and as we left Dan whispered: “This sucks.”

A beautiful day. Vacation. A lovely family. “Good people.” Then this.

Maybe it was because we were all mostly new, or we could so easily see ourselves in him and his family, but this call got to us. The treating paramedic said it best the next day at lunch, “I always thought that karma was a real thing, if you’re good in the world, good things happen to you. . .”

Her voice trailed off.

The Glitch simply is this: We can have plans, we can have our lifeline taped to our bathroom mirror, we can be good people, anxious people or cautious people but the facts are that stuff happens. That’s the glitch. Out-of-the-blue, in the space of one day, everything can change.

A car sails into yours. A home burns down. A child comes home defeated, a niece becomes an addict. You lose your job. The doctor calls with a cancer diagnosis. You tumble off a bicycle.

Life turns on that dime, everything can change in a day.

Firefighting is a Doctorate in the Glitch, in the science of stuff happening. It is what we do, it is what we see each time there is a 9-1-1 call.

The cliché is being a firefighter (or any first responder) toughens your skin, gives you a layer of scar tissue. I think it’s just the opposite. Being a firefighter takes a layer of skin off, peels the onion, makes you more aware of the Glitch, to the fact that anything can happen on any given day that can send your lifeline careening in an entirely new direction.

Now you can think this as dark, or tragic. I prefer to think of it just as “how it is,” it’s how the universe works, it is one of the rules.

How we respond to the fact that life has glitches is up to us.

It seems to me — to be binary for a moment — that we have two choices. If we understand that life is short and unpredictable, we can sink into despair and Nihilism, thinking that there is no meaning here and we can never find joy. That, to me, is just lazy thinking. (Or maybe it’s a phase one goes through their sophomore year of college.) The other option is we can accept the glitch, accept the uncertainty of it all and get on with living. . . not just waiting around until we die or until the Glitch gets us, but get on with living.

Being a firefighter, understanding and accepting uncertainty in our bones, brings all this into focus. Little things matter more. I am amazed by a blue sky, my kids’ laughter, my wife’s touch.

And of course, because of our vocation, because we are often witness to the unplanned, to the surprises in the night, sometimes the glitch leaves me thunderstruck.

A few years ago, a blizzard shut down the interstate in our fire district. The roads were so treacherous that state police cars were positioned to block anyone from driving over a nearby mountain pass. Late that night my pager went off, but it was hard to understand what the dispatcher was saying. I assumed, because of the weather, that the 9-1-1 call was for a car crash. I got up, put on the warmest clothes I could find, and went out the door. Because the call was near our home, I was first on the scene. There was a little pickup truck on the side of the road. It didn’t look damaged. But as I got out of my truck, I heard the dispatcher clearly say that this was an emergency birth, that a woman was in labor in the back seat.

Talk about a glitch in a birth plan: A blizzard, roads closed, and a woman in labor.

I got to the truck, opened the door, and heard that baby cry. I remember thinking it was the most wonderful sound I’d ever experienced. The father, a nurse, had already delivered the baby, who was fine. Our ambulance appeared through the snow and mist. We wrapped mom and baby up, got them in the ambulance, and with a police escort they headed to the hospital.

Here is the lesson. We can hold both thoughts at the same time: Life is short and there’s the Glitch. And yet, always there is the cry of a newborn. That lusty wail that launches a new timeline is a sound that defies all logic; it is the cry “I am” to the dark universe.

Thunderstruck.

Excerpted from Firefighter Zen: A Field Guide to Thriving in Tough Times. Available at your local bookstore or online.