Trust Me…this will never happen to you!

Chief Mario Trevino. Photo from the City of Bellevue, WA web site

Attention all firefighters: the story below details a battle that will never happen to you. It might happen to someone you know, but I assure you it will not happen to you.

Recently, I wrote a post about a video and detailed how I felt the firefighters on scene were better taking their SCBA off than just carrying it around since they weren’t using it. Of course, I was being sarcastic. My point was not to take it off, but to use it. After all they are lugging it around right.

Please visit that post and review the comments. Then realize that this story below is why I wrote what I did.

The story is written by Chief Mario Trevino and is worth your time to read.  This is probably one of the top ten articles written this year!

Here is the story written by Chief Mario Trevino (in order to read it in its entirety please visit this link):

The story I’d like to share with you is deeply personal. It’s also harsh, perhaps even brutal; it’s meant to be. That is because I want anyone who reads it to know exactly what I went through so that, perhaps, they can take whatever steps they find possible to avoid a similar fate. Forewarned, as the saying goes, is forearmed.

Like too many cancer victims, I ignored the symptoms at first. From the beginning of the summer of 2008, I had an annoying, low-grade sore throat. After a few weeks, I realized it was not going to bloom into a cold or the flu. It just lingered. After a while, I started to think I may have had tonsillitis, as, unlike a lot of my peers, I still have my tonsils. What a pain it would be, I thought at the time, to go through surgery in the summertime. I’d heard that a tonsillectomy is a lot more complicated for adults than for children, so I went to work every day, simply ignoring the small pain in my throat and hoping it would just go away.

As the weeks passed, I started having trouble swallowing. I often had to try to swallow a mouthful of food several times before it would finally, grudgingly go down. While I thought it was a weird symptom, I continued to assume it had to do with my tonsils. “I’m going to have to see a doctor about this soon,” I thought. But the weeks passed and I stayed busy and continued to think I would just go back to normal soon. Read the rest of the story

Thanks to FirefighterCloseCalls.com/The Secret List for the heads up on this article.