DISCLAIMER: This episode contains content that may be distressing for some listeners. Please take care while listening.

The siren is silent, the room is calm, and the heart is racing anyway. That’s where our conversation with former firefighter–paramedic Christy Warren begins—inside the strange quiet before chaos and the laser focus that follows once the job lands in your lap.
Across twenty-five years in busy California systems, Christy moved from ambulance to engine to captain, making ten-second front-yard assessments and leading crews through flashover flats, freeway pile-ups, and the awkward, exhausting reality of lifts that manual-handling posters never imagined. She explains why first responders frame calls as tasks, not heroics—cut the roof, force the door, find water—because it’s the only way to think clearly when seconds matter. We go inside station life too: the dry humour that keeps people human, the constant cortisol even during a film at 9pm, and the everyday rituals that get interrupted by someone else’s worst day.
Then the story turns. Christy revisits a children’s house fire where triage collided with scarcity and, years later, the penthouse search that “broke the box” she’d been stuffing full of hard calls. She speaks bluntly about nightmares, intrusive images, rage, and the morning she planned to drive into a tree. What changed the trajectory? Admitting the truth, going off on workers’ comp, and finding a peer community at a six-day retreat where firefighters, medics, cops, and dispatchers speak the same language. EMDR began to work. Shame loosened. The nervous system found a way back to baseline.
We also dig into culture change: how “suck it up” is slowly being replaced by debriefs, peer teams, and early intervention that treats psychological injuries like line-of-duty injuries. Christy shares why she’d choose the career again without hesitation, even as she lives with a body mapped by surgeries, and how the work reshaped her view of fragility, poverty, and resilience.

Christy's Website - https://www.christyewarren.com/

Her Book, "Flashpoint" - https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Point-Firefighters-Journey-Through/dp/1647424488/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UGYTTSWXHTGE&keywords=flash+point+christy+warren&qid=1675272624&sprefix=flash+point+chri%2Caps%2C88&sr=8-1

Her podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-firefighter-deconstructed/id1500483348

Other links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christy-warren-17a978186/

https://www.instagram.com/ffdeconstructed/?hl=en

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https://988lifeline.org/

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