Fireman or Family Man? A Mix of Terminology

I’m not totally sure what it is about firefighting and EMS that completely alters a person’s ability to speak as a normal human being.  I understand that every profession has jargon; its own set of words that only applies to that profession.  I just wonder if every profession has the problem of jargon crossing over into personal life as much as it does in firefighting and EMS.

When I first married my paramedic firefighter, I must have been so in awe of him that I was oblivious to my daily dose of jargon indoctrination.  I vividly remember the first time I thought my husband might have some internal wiring issues though.  I was pregnant with our first baby and we decided to go look at baby strollers and car seats.   He informed his family that we were out shopping for a stretcher, not a stroller.  At the baby supply store, Tradd grilled the unsuspecting, pimply-faced teenage salesman about the stretcher-combo’s weight limit, height requirements, restraint options, safety ratings, and ability to withstand an impact of opposing pickup trucks at 75mph on a dark highway with the closest EMS unit being 45 minutes away, at best. 

Since the sales-teen didn’t know his products well, my husband showed him exactly what those babies could do.  He made the teen learn how to collapse the stretcher down, open it back up, flip the quick-release tabs in microseconds (in case of a water rescue, I guess) and do anything else that a baby stretcher might need to do in order to protect the life of our infant.  By the time we left, the teen was an hour past the end of his shift, sweating profusely, and wishing he knew what the heck a stretcher had to do with baby strollers.

This became normal for us though.  When Tradd installed the infant car seat three months before our baby was even due, he actually crouched down into it with his own body weight to cinch it down so tight that Hercules would have needed assistance to release it.  When I told Tradd that I wouldn’t be able to undo the seat belt or the anchor straps to switch it to another car he lectured me on the death rates of children in auto accidents and swore our child would not become a statistic if he could prevent it.  He appeased me by buying a second car seat and using the kneel-and-cinch method to install it in my Jeep for me.  I considered this a logical compromise.  

I’ve noticed the crossover problem with other firefighters and in other settings too.  We’ve been grocery shopping before and seen off-duty firefighters grab at their hip pagers because the store manager decided to announce the weekly deli special over the intercom.  Restaurants are another problem spot.  When we go out to eat, I usually take charge of the flashy, vibrating restaurant pager because I figure Tradd will still be waiting for the tones to drop 10 minutes after the hostess gets tired of paging us.  And if, for some reason, someone arrives after us and is seated before us, Tradd might lean over to me and mutter that this is exactly what is wrong with patient care these days.  Anymore, I usually just have to remind him once that in the civilian world the term is customer service and not patient care.

I’ve come to learn that, no matter what society thinks of us, our friends at the fire department know exactly what we’re talking about.  They know when stretcher really means stroller and patient really means customer.  They understand how working a child at the scene of an auto accident can make a person extra cautious about the safety of his own children.  Our fire family members are the only ones who don’t look at us oddly when, after I’ve been sick with a cold, Tradd asks if I’m 10-8, in-service, yet.  Somehow, no explanations are necessary; firefighters and their families simply understand.