The Ghost Turd Stories Podcast

GUEST INTRODUCTION: Scott started the Tucson, Arizona Fire Department Academy in 1999 and served on the Tucson Fire Department until his retirement in 2020.

Scott was a firefighter for two years after his twenty-two week academy and then became a paramedic for the remainder of his career.

Scott's favorite part about his job was helping people in desperate need and he was able to do that effectively as a paramedic, reducing the burden of his stressful and challenging schedule.

Scott is now a nurse and continues his passion for helping people who need medical help.

He has a beautiful family of five, two of which are now firefighters themselves.

His beautiful wife is my wife's sister and they live less than fifteen minutes from us so I get the joy of spending time with Scott on occasion.

PODCAST INTRODUCTION: Hello everyone and welcome to Ghost Turd Stories.

I'm your host Troy Gent.

Ghost Turd Stories mission is using humorous and challenging stories from veterans and first responders to reduce the burden of families whose veteran or first responder took their own life.

Ghost Turd Stories vision is to use humorous and challenging stories to prevent suicide within our ranks and reduce the burden of families whose veteran or first responder took their own life.

We hope to attract veterans and first responders as well as those interested in knowing more about what it's like to be in our shoes while we wear or wore those shoes.

LET US TELL YOUR STORY! COMMERCIAL: At Ghost Turd Stories, we tell and write the stories of veterans and first responders for their families and friends.

We love storytelling and believe there is nothing more inspiring and nothing that gets people to take action like a great story.

Families and friends want to know the sacrifices we made, the services we rendered, and the people we lifted so they can be inspired and learn about the legacy we left.

Our podcast is the face of our company but we want every family who cares to know about the experiences their veteran and or first responder went through for them.

We interview veterans and first responders, collect pictures, write their stories, and compile them in a book for their families and friends to enjoy.

Oftentimes, it's difficult for us to talk to our loved ones about what we did, saw, and heard while serving.

At Ghost Turd Stories, we bridge the gap.

For pricing, visit linktr.ee/ghostturdstories and click on the second tab directly under the podcast link called Let Us Write Your Story!

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TROY GENT: Alright, well, thanks for coming, Scott.

Welcome.

Go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and your career.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Well, let's see.

I actually went to college first and finished up about spring of 1997.

And then I was down at Tucson.

I'd gone to college up in Flagstaff, Arizona.

I had done an internship, I had gone to graduate school and I ran into a friend who told me to try to do a ride along with the fire department.

He thought I would fit in well.

I had never really thought about it but I was kind of deciding on what direction I wanted to go with my career.

And in 1998, I went on a ride along and just being in the truck and the response in the truck and going code three down the road, I knew that's really where I wanted to be.

TROY GENT: Was there a lot of adrenaline?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah, even just sitting in the passenger seat, seeing them responding and seeing the truck move through traffic and knowing what kind of call we were going to.

I just felt really alive.

TROY GENT: Did that hold true throughout your career?

Was it always there for twenty-one years or whatever?

SCOTT BILLINGS: I'd say there were times when you’d feel more of a rush than others.

I was pretty blessed in that sense where I always felt really engaged ninety-five plus percent of the time in my career of responding to calls.

In the middle of the night, it's always a little bit tougher at three in the morning but I tended to actually really shine after midnight.

My lull in my career during the day was always between like one and five pm.

I literally could barely function early to late afternoon.

But after that, like early morning up to one and then evening into night and overnight, that's really where I shined.

For some reason, I could easily wake up in the middle of the night and just instantly be awake and alert.

A lot of guys really struggled with that, which got them into situations where they got into trouble because they weren't thinking And they weren't preparing their minds on the way to a call.

You can't really show up half-engaged when you're going to something critical in the middle of the night, especially as a medic.

TROY GENT: I was kind of the same way in the Marine Corps where I'd be ready to go super early and I piss people off sometimes.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah.

TROY GENT: They were like, “Stop having so much energy!”

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah and they would look at me and I get to call at two in the morning and I'm like, "Hey guys!

Hey!”

And they're like, get "Get out of my face!"

There are certain nights like the doomsday shift on our tour."

We call it a tour.

So it was one twenty-four hour shift on, one twenty-four hour shift off for five shifts and then we would get six days off.

So we were on a five-six.

TROY GENT: How long would it take you in that six days to feel like, "I've recovered from that one-on-one-off schedule."

SCOTT BILLINGS: Oh, we were a very busy city so it took me a couple of days.

I always said that everything bad that ever could happen in life and on shift happened on the fourth shift of our five-day tour.

Because by the time you got to the fourth shift, everybody was pissed at the world and everyone was angry.

Everyone was already so tired into the fourth shift that everyone would get into fights.

It seemed like all the bad calls happened then.

Maybe it was just more remarkable in my mind because I was always so tired by the fourth twenty-four hour shift.

The whole crew was on edge.

You didn't really thrive as a firefighter in life.

As you went through the years, you just kind of existed.

But by the fourth shift, if you had worked the whole tour, it was on.

And then when you got to the fifth shift, you were euphoric because you were like, "Oh man, I got less than twenty-four hours so I got my sixth day off."

But the fourth shift, it's like overcoming that wall, that great wall in front of you.

By that point, you were chronically tired.

You were fatigued.

You didn't have the focus and concentration and were on edge already.

Everybody got into arguments.

We had brawls at the station, not physical mostly, but I remember one time...

I mean, this was just kind of how really ridiculous it got.

You're supposed to let everyone know in the morning if you're in or out for chow and I didn't indicate properly if I was going to be in or out for lunch.

So I had multiple people basically yelling at me because I was going to cost them like two dollars more for the day.

And this is like fourth shift into the tour and I was just like, "What the hell are we arguing about at this point?"

You're arguing over two dollars."

It really got into a fight.

And then the captain started being like, "You're irresponsible and you're selfish!"

And I'm like, "Dude, I'm barely existing at this point.

It's like fourth shift.

I can't even think straight and I just forgot to tell you about chow."

And so we got to the point where I was just like, "You want to take me out?"

I was standing in the middle of the family room and I was like, "Okay, let's fight then!"

We were fighting over like a two dollar chow bill over lunch.

I walked away and I walked into the locker room.

I was aggressive on my end.

I was mad at that point because I was on edge.

But some of the days you just would like kind of look at each other and feel on edge.

You just learned to kind of steer away from each other at times and everyone would kind of be able to go to their rooms to have a little bit of space.

You learned that certain crews were known for starting or causing trouble.

So you kind of knew going into those crews in that station.

It might be even a station that was well known.

But we had certain shifts like A-shift was very uptight and rigid.

They were like, "Hey guys!"

They were like the more straight-laced guys.

C-shift were kind of the guys who were on the fringe guys who were kind of always living on the edge.

They were always kind of trouble-causers.

And then B shift was like, happy, go lucky, funny guys.

And so I always knew going in with some of the C-shift crews that it was going to be on.

Even if you weren't on their shift, interacting with them in the morning leaving or coming on was...

They were on edge all the time and they were always poking the bear, so to speak.

I remember I used to ride my bike to station fifteen and I was on B-shift at the time.

And C shift...

They were just a bunch of ass wipes, man.

They were always looking for trouble.

I remember I would ride my bike in the morning and I would walk through the front door and carry the bike.

I wouldn't even roll it through the station.

Well, they thought it was arrogant of me to carry my bike through the station.

TROY GENT: They would have rather had you roll it?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Well, no.

They wanted me to go around the outside of the building and find an exterior door in the bay and just knock on the door, ring the buzzer, and leave it in the bay.

TROY GENT: Okay.

SCOTT BILLINGS: But it was hard to get to that side of the station and when I rode up, you always rode up right to the front door.

Well, they thought that I was just being arrogant about it and one day they just went off on me.

Just like, "Who do you think you are carrying your bike through the station?!"

And I was just like, "What are you talking about?"

So I go, "Oh you don't like my bike in the station?"

I let it down and I started riding it around the station inside.

And I was like, "Oh, you don't like it in the station?"

So I started rolling it around the station and rocking it all through everywhere.

I go, "You don't like that?

Then take me on!"

So then I was like ready to fight all five of them.

I was like, "I can't believe people are like this."

But I knew kind of their past and their history.

TROY GENT: Yeah.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Eventually, after it kind of settled down, that incident, the captain from C-shift came up to me and he was actually like, "Hey, I'm glad you stood up to them because they would have probably ridden you about little things going on."

But that's kind of how fire life was.

You literally had to gather yourself walking in the front door each day because it was a gauntlet.

There were two tables in the family room area and everyone was sitting at them.

And so as soon as you walked in the front door, they're all sitting there having coffee and they're like, "Oh, Billings!

How's your mom today?"

And so it was like you literally kind of had to gather yourself and build yourself up before you opened the door and walked between the tables cause for the next twenty-four hours, they were going to try to cut you down as much as they could.

It was like walking into a lion's den but every single lion is the alpha male lion.

You know?

I mean it was like, "Who can beat down who to be on top."

Kind of getting back to it, where I started, after that ride along I ended up applying in spring of 1999 and there were roughly I think thirty-hundred guys that tested and it ended up getting whittled down to forty of us that ended up getting into the class.

TROY GENT: Is that what their cap is forty for a class?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Well, it just depends on their needs for that year but it ended up getting whittled.

I didn't have any fire experience.

I didn't have any EMT.

My background was in exercise physiology and biology so I had a background with the human body but I didn't have any EMT experience, no fire.

TROY GENT: What set you apart that out of thirty-two hundred, they picked you?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Well, I scored really well on the written and then the physical was a breeze because I was trained very hard.

But then we had multiple interviews with like a city board and then we had them with a fireboard interview only and I think I knocked it out of the park with both interviews.

I tried to just be genuine and sincere.

They ask you a question and then they interject something in the middle of the answer to see if it throws you off and I was able to just redirect and answer it.

"Well, let me answer that for you and then come back."

So they could see I was able to change gears pretty well.

I think out of the thirty-two hundred processed, I ended up scoring sixth.

I ended up getting in and we started in July of 1999, which is in the middle of summer in Tucson, which was absolutely brutal.

I figured the first two weeks of the academy were just...

It was like basically survival mode.

We were drilling all day on blacktop in the middle of summer and I was wearing thirty pounds of insulation.

I thought at many points that I was going to die and I was physically fit because I trained.

I was training in like washes and thick sand and running in heat and nothing ever prepared me for it.

Literally, it was utter...

It was utter hell.

I remember staring at other people thinking, "I'm not going to die before them.

I won't let myself die before them."

I remember we would do eight hours a day.

I would go through a minimum of a thirty-two-ounce bottle an hour and I wouldn't pee for nine, or ten hours.

I was just drenched from head to toe.

I remember my heartbeat was like a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty just standing doing nothing just because of the heat.

You couldn't dissipate any heat out of the turnouts.

It's amazing how the human body adjusts.

After a couple of weeks, you actually instead of survive, he started to kind of thrive.

But there were a couple of guys who went down and passed out but that was the hardest part was adjusting to the extreme heat.

We would do a PT in the morning so we would already be tired and then we would drill all day in turnouts.

There were a couple of guys that threw up but it was mostly just dehydration and feeling kind of like you were going to pass out or passing out and it became so monotonous.

It was just pull hose, throw hose, lay down hose, pick it up, pull hose, throw hose, lay it down, pick it up.

And you just do it for hours so it's so monotonous.

We had this one, it was called the mud bog, and we actually had to pull a charged hose line, which is very hard to pull and it was in thick mud and water in full turnouts.

And I remember by that point it was like three weeks in.

I was like, "Hell yeah, man.

I'm feeling good.

Like I could just tear through walls."

And I remember they charged it to fully charged so it was a fifty-foot section fully charged with water and you're trudging through heavy mud and water.

You had to turn the hose on, which causes negative push on you.

And I remember just literally turning on this hose and walking like I was literally walking with a pillow in my arm and just walking straight through the mud and charging.

And I remember, the captain walking over and going, "Who the hell do you think you are showing me up like this and walking through the mud so fast?!"

He goes, "You obviously don't have that hose charged correctly!"

And then he grabbed the hose and turned it on and it like jerked him back and he almost fell in the mud.

And he goes, "Son of a bitch, Billings!

Who do you think you are showing us up like that?"

And I was just like, "I'm just doing my thing, man."

I felt like superhuman by that point, like three or four weeks into it.

Like I was already really well trained but then I think I had adapted and I was extremely strong.

They thought I was showing them up.

I was just like, "You told me to squirt the hose, walk through thick mud, and walk at this target and spray it and that's what I'm doing.

He goes, "You must be arrogant!".

They always thought I was arrogant.

Everyone thought I was arrogant.

I was just doing my thing.

In my world, if you tell me to do something, I'm going to kick its ass.

Like if you tell me to run towers, I'm going to beat everybody.

You tell me to march through mud.

I'm going to go as fast as I can and hit the target.

If we're going to go through twenty-two weeks of this, I'm going to be the guy who's always cheering on everybody.

And so I would like pat people on the butt as we were running towers.

I'd be like, "Hey, we can do this.

Let's go,

Let's go."

So I kind of became the cheerleader.

TROY GENT: Were you rewarded for that at the end?

SCOTT BILLINGS: We got votes.

One guy, it was him and I that got like "Super Boot" and I guess he beat me out by a couple of votes.

Super good guy.

I would never take anything away from him but I was right there, apparently.

But it wasn't really ever my goal to obtain any award.

It was like, "Hey, I'm doing okay.

I'm going to make sure everybody else is doing okay. Now throughout the rest of the Academy."

Even at one point in the Academy, I started having so much fun.

I was just like, "I'm going to challenge these captains to a hose throw.

And they've all got big egos.

I was like, "Hey, I want to challenge you guys to a hose throw."

And they're like, "Oh really?"

So I was like, "Why don't you set up two cones as far down the blacktop as you want and I'll throw this hose and I'll make it roll right between the cones."

And they started to laugh.

They started to laugh.

And then I had these guys, everyone was watching me.

They were like, "Billings, you got some balls, man."

And I was just like, "I can do this," because I thought they were going to set it up maybe fifteen feet away, twenty.

They went like almost the full length of the hose like fifty feet away and they set the cones literally, I'm not kidding you, maybe fifteen inches apart.

And I was like, "Oh, that's great.

You ass wipes.

You're setting me up to fail so I look like an idiot in front of my whole class for challenging you, right?

So I was like, "Okay!

Okay, I'll show you."

And at that point, I was kind of...

My ego was like, "Man, this is going to suck if I miss this in front of everyone.

I challenge these captains."

So I line up. I was like, "Okay, let's go!

Let's go!"

And so I line it up.

I rear back and I throw that hose.

it kind of goes offline a little bit.

It starts to veer to the right.

And I was like, "Oh no."

And then she starts to pull center again and it rolls right through those fricking cones.

Right through the middle of those fifteen-inch cones and I'm not kidding you.

You would have thought we won the Super Bowl.

Every kid in that class, we were like, "Yeah!"

All at once we were jumping up and down and I was like shooting guns at the captains.

I was like, "Yeah!

Yeah!"

Because I had challenged them, I was just like, "If I make this, I don't have to run any more towers.

You can't punish me with any more towers."

I was like running around shooting guns like I was a wild gunslinger.

And so they're like, "Okay, you don't have to run towers but everyone's gonna run them for you."

And so they ended up winning in the end because they set me up to where I won but they weren't going to let me win.

But at that point, I felt comfortable enough.

I was like, "Hey if I'm going to be in here another nine weeks, I'm going to have a little bit of fun with it."

TROY GENT: Were you married to Mindy?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah, I was married to Mindy.

TROY GENT: So you'd go home every night.

Yeah, and we just had our first son.

And so I would go home and come back.

So we would come in at six in the morning and I would always tell everybody, you'd be driving down, Wilmot Road, you'd turn off the freeway and get on Wilmot Road, and you would immediately get IBS.

You'd get like Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

It never failed.

As soon as I turned right onto Wilmot Road, I'd have to take a dump.

And so I was like, "Oh gosh!"

And it wasn't just me.

It was everybody..

As soon as we'd get to the academy, everybody would be running into the stalls and everybody would be like, "Oh gosh, I can't handle this," because we'd all be nervous what was going to happen that day.

So one day I walked in.

And I walked in and there's a stall and all the stalls are full and I'm like, "Guys!

Come on!"

I walked up to a stall and I went, "You're the worst smelling human being.

The worst piece of shit I've ever smelled in my life."

And one of the captains stood up out of the stall and he's like, "Really, Billings?

Really?

That's what you think of me?"

And I was like, "Oh, I'm so sorry, sir.

I didn't think you would use our stalls."

At that point they had it out for me, right?

And they always knew I was kind of like the jokester.

So at one point, I had to take a dump and it was like 06:50 and we had to line up at 07:00 and I wasn't anywhere near the bathroom so I had to run back into our locker area.

And I was taking a dump and I was in a rush and I'm like trying to get done and I lean over and they had metal dispensers and I just ripped my leg open on the metal dispenser.

It starts just draining blood all down my leg and I'm like, "Son of a bitch.

What am I gonna do?!"

So I was like, "I don't have time to treat it."

So I run back out to the pad.

I barely get there at like 06:59.

I line up.

We had to stand at attention.

TROY GENT: Were you in pants or shorts?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Shorts.

So we're all standing in shorts.

I'm lined up.

We're all lined up by alphabetical order.

I'm standing there.

There's blood just rolling down my leg but I wasn't going to say anything about it.

The captains, they walk around from person to person like, "Tell me a fact this morning Billings."

That's what they do every day.

And so they walk up and they're like, "Billings! What the hell happened to you this morning?!"

I was like, "Well, sir.

I don't really want to tell you, sir."

And he goes, "Well you have to tell me!"

So I was like, "Sir, I was taking a dump this morning and trying to wipe my bottom and I leaned over too far and ripped my leg open on the dispenser, sir."

And he goes, "Are you a total idiot, Billings?!"

Everyone was laughing as they were standing at attention.

They were all laughing behind me.

I had to go get it dressed up.

At the end of the day, we were getting a lecture and they were like, "Well, we have a special award we wanted to present to someone today.

It's Billings.

Come on up."

And they had this trophy.

It was like a soccer football trophy for kids and they had a roll of toilet paper stuffed over its head.

And they said, "We wanted to present you this trophy for getting injured in the line of doody," and it was D-O-O-D-Y

Doody.

And so they handed it to me in front of the class and they're like, “Take this home with you.”

TROY GENT: Do you still have that?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Uh, no.

No, I chucked it out the window on the way home.

I mean, there was funny stuff like that all the time at the Academy.

By the end, it was like, I was trying to be a little more lighthearted and enjoy it.

Whereas in the beginning, you were just stressed every day.

After that, I was on fire for a year.

They took us out of the field and we went through seven months of paramedic school at the University of Arizona and so that was full-time.

It was forty hours a week.

TROY GENT: But then after that you still served...

SCOTT BILLINGS: As a firefighter for six more months and then I was promoted to medic.

TROY GENT: You told me privately that you were hazed a lot.

Well, I mean, my thing was that I ended up getting to a station with ten guys and my captain...

He wasn't a super nice guy to say the least.

So he rode me about a lot of things.

And then my engineer, he was really an egotistical guy.

So, I mean, from the moment I got there, he had me shining axe handles like for hours on end every day when I knew how to be doing chores in the station.

We had a big dorm.

We all slept in bunks just next to each other.

And every call for every truck, I would have to get up and open their bay doors and go press the button and then press the button when they left and I'd close it and then try to go back to bed.

We would run races.

I remember a guy saying he was a walk on at U of A.

This is my engineer again.

He was a cornerback so he was super fast.

And he was just like, "I'm going to challenge you to a sprint!"

And I was just like, "Oh, come on, man.

I don't wanna."

And he goes, "So I want us to sprint down the driveway."

It was like eighty yards maybe.

And he goes, "'I'm so fast.

I'm going to torch you."

Everyone thought I had an ego because I was strong and physically fit.

That wasn't it.

It was always a challenge to me.

But I was like, "Whatever man."

So we line up at the bottom of the driveway.

The whole crew, all nine guys are standing out there watching, right?

And he's just like, "Go!"

And I torch him by like fifteen or twenty feet.

He's like, "Oh, that's the most ridiculous -

I slipped!

That's the most ridiculous thing!

I'm faster than you!"

He's yelling.

He's walking around.

Of course it pissed him off that I beat him but everything I do in life, I'm trying as hard as I can.

Right?

So he's like, "I want to go back and do it again!"

I was like, "Well, not today.

Let's maybe another."

So it's like the next shift.

My crew, they line up again outside.

TROY GENT: What does the crew actually think of this guy?

SCOTT BILLINGS: They think he's an ass wipe.

Right?

They really do because he's so egotistical and he's one of those guys that never shuts up.

He's always talking about how good he is.

And so they have an American flag they're holding this time.

And so we line up, he says go, and I torch him again.

As I run by, they hand me the American flag and I'm holding up the American flag over my head as I'm running around.

I'm going to rub it right in his face this time.

I'm running around with it over my head and being like, "Heck yeah!"

I'm just eating up his ego and I'm running back and forth in front of him.

We used to have hose rolling races where they would lay out hose and then we would get the hose rolling and we would see who could roll it the fastest and I was real fast.

But one point they stuck a piece of large wood into my hose so when I got to like twenty or thirty feet in, the hose just went and it just hit the wood and I couldn't roll up anymore.

Basically, I walked out into a door from outside and then I walked back out and they dumped a bucket of water on me from up overhead.

And I probably shouldn't have done this, but I took everything he owned -

TROY GENT: He's the dude that dumped water on you?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah, the engineer.

I took all of his contents out of his locker, all of his clothes, all of his stuff, his personal stuff, and I dumped it into a pile in the back and I just took a fire hose to it and I started spraying it and it just got it completely soaked and destroyed half of it.

Well, then I locked my locker thinking they couldn't get to my stuff.

Well there were little vent holes and he took a fire extinguisher and emptied a fire extinguisher into my locker.

And so it kind of built up.

At some point you start realizing it's going to escalate into a fist fight so I had to kind of back down at some point.

TROY GENT: Is there a rank structure being a paramedic?

TROY GENT: Yeah, firefighter is the lowest rank and then there's engineer, paramedic, captain, and battalion chief.

TROY GENT: So you remained a paramedic.

So you just never got to captain?

SCOTT BILLINGS: No, I didn't really care.

Captain was more kind of administrative overseeing the crew and the station and running the scene on fires.

Disciplinary stuff.

Reviews.

I just loved being in the middle, in the back of the medic truck.

TROY GENT: So by choice you stayed paramedic.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah, I never really had a desire to be captain.

I mean, I thought about it a couple of times but I just really loved serving people and helping people and being in the middle of a heat.

I don't care what anybody says.

Paramedic had a hundred times more responsibility than any other position.

Ninety percent of our calls in the city were medical.

You were the go-to person.

TROY GENT: When it was a fire and no casualties were involved, would you just become a firefighter?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah, so we had a dual roll.

So we had turnouts in the medic truck and we would go to the fire turnout and then go to the fire.

TROY GENT: Yeah.

SCOTT BILLINGS: And so we would get assigned certain roles at fires.

A lot of times we were rehab because they wanted the medics to check out the firefighters but then other times, other crews, the captains would have you go in.

But that was my role for all twenty years and I got pretty high in seniority in the medic rank.

One of the most gruesome calls that I had gone on and that's not necessarily funny but we had a drug Lord that the SWAT team was called into and they apparently busted in his door and he opened up fire on them, apparently.

I think it was a handgun or something.

Well, they had high-power rifles and they were going to win.

Well, when we got called there, it was just called to a shooting.

We got called to a backside room that was maybe twelve by fourteen, and he was lying on the floor face-up.

We walked in and I'm not kidding you all the police and all the SWAT were pinned against the wall like the floor had cooties on it.

But then I looked down to the floor.

They were pinned against the wall with their arms and were like, "You guys come on in!"

Like they did not...

I was like, "What the hell are you guys doing?"

And then I looked down and this guy was blown up.

There was blood probably covering eighty-five percent of the floor and apparently they had opened up fire on him.

They had shot once, blown apart his...

I think his right arm but then they shot him through the abdomen.

I'm not real good with guns and high-power rifles and the bullets but apparently it was so high-powered that it went through his abdomen and it ended up pulling all of his abdominal contents out the other hole.

So his abdomen wasn't blown open, it was one hole to the other, but all of his intestine was pulled out.

I can't say all but there was probably seven feet of it pulled out of the other side onto the ground.

And they were just like, "Hurry!"

They were like ghost white.

And this ain't any slide against police but we always said that if you wanted anybody to handle like a critical situation, like we always thought that fire was best.

Now, obviously in the situations with burglaries and shootouts, on their side, police are fantastic.

But we always kind of had this friendly rivalry, right?

And we respected the hell out of police and they respected the fire.

But we always thought emotionally...

We always said police were soft.

We're like, "They're soft.”

Right?

When we did PT, we trained for an hour and a half.

When they did PT, they ran a quarter mile and they had a line of six or seven casualty people that were on light duty because they injured themselves on the half mile of the day before.

Right?

So anyway, we walked in.

I was like, "What are you guys?"

And then I looked down and was like, "Oh, that's a lot of blood."

But I was like, "I'll handle it."

TROY GENT: It wasn't even a thing to you.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Well, I had a job to do.

I'm walking in blood and boots.

I'll clean up later.

And it's not like you're like, "Oh wow, this is so much fun!"

But it's like, "Okay, we've got a job to do."

So I walked over in the blood and we're trying to piece together his arm.

He's conscious and he's Spanish-speaking.

He's talking.

If you can imagine like slimy, squirmy, jelly, like guts, that's what it was.

And then we picked it up, we just threw it on his abdomen, just grabbed him, sat him up, I just grabbed like gauze, like heavy-duty gauze and pads, and wrapped him up and got his guts pressed against his abdomen.

We had a line going, we loaded him up on the gurney, and then just went code three to the hospital but he was talking the whole way.

TROY GENT: It's incredible they can have that much trauma in their conscience.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah and I think to some degree adrenaline kicks in on their end.

Your vasculature constricts and you're getting everything to your vital organs: your brain, your heart, and your lungs.

But I remember another guy.

He was kind of like a biker dude, one of those typical biker dudes, and we were on Pima.

We got a call to a basically like car and the motorcycle and he had a car pull out in front of him in front of him and he T-boned the car and he went over the top.

I remember getting there to him.

He was lying on the ground.

He was talking to us.

People always know when they're going to die.

They will tell you one hundred percent of the time.

Like we got there and he was like, "Oh gosh.

I'm going to die.

I'm going to die."

And I was like, "No, not right now.

Not right now."

And I remember taking off his shoe and he must have caught his shoe either on a piece of the metal of the car or on the bike.

His foot was just torn apart.

Like literally ripped open and it was cadaver white and there was no blood.

And I was, I remember looking at his foot going, "Oh, you're going to die."

TROY GENT: And what does that mean?

SCOTT BILLINGS: It means basically he shunted everything to his core.

TROY GENT: Okay.

SCOTT BILLINGS: So he had no blood flow to his extremities.

TROY GENT: Did that happen because of shock?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yes, because of shock.

TROY GENT: So the body's in shock.

It doesn't necessarily need to do it but it just goes in shock.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Well, the body innately will shunt blood away from anything that doesn't absolutely need it to everything that does and that caused basically blood to start to fill up in his chest around his heart.

The body was going into shock.

He was losing blood internally.

And I remember looking down at his foot, I was at his head and I was looking at his foot, going, "Oh yeah.

You're going to die."

And I remember thinking about it.

I didn't say it but he kept repeating it over and over.

It's kind of eerie when you know you're in those final moments.

So we got him to the hospital and they cracked his chest and he instantly bled out and died.

We had guys like that all the time.

On the funnier side, we've had like an eighty-year-old woman.

She was on the toilet at home and she was trying to clean herself up after and she slipped in between the toilet and the tub, which is about maybe fourteen inches apart.

And she wedged herself perfectly so her butt was wedged towards the tub and her hips were wedged in between the toilet and the tub.

And she was there.

We got called for a fall.

She had been there for about twenty-four hours.

TROY GENT: Who finally found her?

SCOTT BILLINGS: I don't know if it was a neighbor or if someone did a welfare check or a family member that came over but she had been stuck there and it's like her ass had melted into the tub.

And we had like three guys.

I'm not kidding you.

I was pulling as hard as humanly possible.

So at some point my captain's all, "You're going to have to go get some Vaseline and lube her up Billings."

I was like, "Lube her up?"

So I was just like, "Oh my gosh."

I was the young guy, right?

I'm like taking handfuls of Vaseline and I'm rubbing it between her privates and her butt cheeks and the wall of the tub and she's just looking over smiling at me and I'm like, "Are you?

Am I doing this right?"

Some young guy is rubbing your chonch.

I was trying to look away.

Of course I'm like almost throwing up in my mouth because you don't want to see an eighty-year-old woman naked.

You don't want to but I'm like trying to lube up her butt cheeks and we finally got her like dislodged but it literally felt like her ass had melted into the tub.

Another one...

I was a medic at this point and we had a larger breasted woman and she had chest pain.

There were six of us on the crew.

My brain works like a squirrel so I get distracted.

So I hear little things off to the side.

I hear conversations.

I start to look around.

But I'm doing a twelve lead on this lady and I have to expose her.

She's got very large breasts and I lift up her breast with my forearm and I put the electrodes on and I put them around her chest.

We get her place.

I say, "Ma'am, sit nice and still."

We get a picture of her heart but then I start to lose focus.

And so I'm looking at the monitor, looking away from her.

Then I look back and then I hear a conversation off the side and I'm starting to pull up.

We have little clips that clip into the leads, little clips that go "click, click."

And so I'm pulling them off.

I pull them off her sternum and then her middle chest and then I'm pulling on one and I can't get it to come loose.

But I'm looking at my crew, looking away, and I'm pulling and I'm pulling and I finally look back.

And I was pulling on her nipple and I was just like, "Oh my gosh."

And she was smiling at me going, "That's okay.

I'm enjoying this."

Once again, It was one of those really awkward moments.

I was like, "I'm so sorry, ma'am."

There are lots of funny stories but there are lots of very tragic stories.

I remember a car full of girls got T-boned in a major intersection by a Ford F150 at a very high rate of speed.

Ninety-nine point nine percent of the calls you forget as soon as you're done but I remember this one.

Like the truck was embedded into the side of the car and I remember looking in initially and just feeling this overwhelming sense of doom.

Like one girl had died instantly.

The other girl was unconscious in the front and another one was injured in the driver's side but we couldn't get the truck dislodged from the car and my engineer ended up jumping in the truck and ended up trying to drive the truck.

Well, it ended up starting to roll the car.

And so we were trying to figure it out.

I was like starting to yell.

I was yelling across the car because the car started moving and I didn't want it to start rolling away with these girls.

And I remember in those moments in your mind you're thinking, "How do I decide who's worth saving?

Who do I grab to help first?"

And I think that's what I love most about being a medic.

You're so hyper-focused.

You never feel more alive than in those moments.

I remember after that call, a lot of the guys were really shaken up but no one wants to relive the trauma, right?

So I remember we went back to the station.

We had a debriefing.

It's like sitting in a room with ten alpha dudes and then a therapist coming in and saying, "Do you all want to talk about this?"

And everyone just sitting there silently going. "No."

And then like the therapist is like, "Let's express our feelings," and you're like, "Who the hell wants to sit and relive the call?"

TROY GENT: So that happened?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah because it was very overwhelming emotionally.

TROY GENT: This was a debriefing just with the captain.

SCOTT BILLINGS: No, it was all of us in a family room, all sitting together.

TROY GENT: Just the ones on the call.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah but we were all pretty much there because we had multiple crews there.

So we're all supposed to sit down and have like a what?

A come to Jesus moment or a Kumbaya.

And the therapist is like, "Let's all tell each other how we're feeling right now."

And you're like, "I don't want to think about that.

I don't want to think about those things.

I just want to move on."

Right?

You sit there awkwardly for a half hour and no one says a word because that's fire life.

TROY GENT: Do you think that even though you wouldn't say a word is that something you're going to have to work at later?

SCOTT BILLINGS: I was sent a book one time and I laughed when I got the book but it is true.

The title of the book was Feelings Buried Alive Never Die.

They don't go away.

They just resurface at some point with addiction or depression or suicidality or some other violence.

For me, I started to develop...

Like, I really can't explain it.

At first, I didn't understand.

I thought I was going crazy.

But then later on in my career, I would talk to guys and I realized that it was every single one of us.

I couldn't tolerate loud noises.

I couldn't be in crowds anymore.

I didn't really like socializing anymore.

Like I would go to my kids’ games and I would see a crowd of parents talking and I couldn't get myself to physically manifest myself to walk over and talk to them.

It was just like I was so overwhelmed emotionally all the time.

I couldn't have any more input in my private life.

I didn't feel anything emotionally.

I was just like, just kind of dead to the world.

My kids would fall.

I remember Peyton one time he blew his finger off with a high-powered like pellet gun.

And so they're out in the backyard shooting and it's a high-powered pellet gun and he comes back to the glass door and he's got his thumb over the barrel.

And I don't notice, right?

And my daughter who's like two, she walks over and the butt of the gun is on the ground.

She walks over and presses the trigger and it blows the pellet through his finger.

And she goes, "I shot you."

And like she's saying this.

She's two years old.

It blows a part of his thumb and he comes in the house.

I remember thinking, “He's really upset,” and I literally felt nothing.

And he's just like...

He's over the sink and I was all, "Let's clean it up.

Let's go.”

And he starts to pass out.

And I was like, "Come on, man!

Suck it up."

And Mindy was like, "You're a real ass hole."

And I remember at that point, I was like maybe eleven years into it, twelve years into it.

TROY GENT: Yeah.

SCOTT BILLINGS: I remember thinking, "Huh.

Maybe I am."

Every time I would hear a child scream or Mindy would come in, let's say from work, she works shifts at night, and she would come in and the door would creak, I would jump out of bed and feel violent.

And I remember telling Mindy, I was like, "I don't know what's going on.

I don't feel the same anymore, but I don't know.

I think it's just me.

It got to the point where I was like, maybe fourteen years into my career, fifteen years in.

All I ever thought about literally, I'm not kidding you, twenty-four hours a day, was how to get more sleep.

Like I said before, I was barely existing at that point.

Mindy had the strength to walk up to me one day.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed and I remember I was in front of my dresser on the edge of the bed and I was just staring at the dresser.

And she walked over and she goes, "Do something now."

And I was just like, "What are you talking about?

What?"

She goes, "Change now.

Get to a new station now."

For her to say something she must have seen like something really really big and I think I was just perpetually depressed and exhausted.

A slower station opened up shortly after and I won it because I was real senior by that point and it was like life changing.

Like life changing.

Like I got more rest.

I started to feel energy again.

TROY GENT: You didn't have as many night calls?

No, night calls were the big thing.

There were perpetual night calls but at that station you got a lot of rest and a lot of naps and I felt a lot better.

So like my PTSD, it started to...

I call it simmer down.

I could handle more noises and talk to people more and being in crowds was a little bit better.

It started to kind of fade a little bit.

It's still never like fully ever leaves you.

I still feel it to some degree.

But now that I'm retired and I get sleep regularly, I don't feel it as much.

There are times when I get tired that I feel like sensitivity to noises and crowds and things come back.

Before I retired, I spent several years talking to different guys and I realized it was a chronic syndrome with fire and police and military.

TROY GENT: So you thought you were the only one for a while?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Oh, a long time.

I started hearing guys losing their wives.

One guy's wife left him.

Other guys were on the verge of killing themselves.

Other guys would drink.

They would take sleeping meds.

I had one guy tell me one time his wife was talking about leaving him.

This was about a year before I retired.

And he said, "I sat at the edge of my bed the other night with a gun and I was going to take my life."

He goes, "But I decided not to."

What do you do?

What do you do with a guy like that?

If I say anything to anybody, his career is gone.

They'll take him off the job.

But if I don't, then he takes his life?

He came back and he was like, " I'm not going to,"

But I started to realize more and more, everybody was medicating themselves with something, either alcohol or drugs.

It was anything to get rid of the trauma that they had always seen and buried.

TROY GENT: What did you do to finally deal with it if you have and then what made the biggest difference?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Well, when I left, when I retired, I thought it was gonna be easygoing.

Well, I retired and went full time nursing.

It was 2020 and I was working in ER and I was charge nurse almost every day and it was just an onslaught of just massive stress.

Before I knew it I was running like five different units instead of one.

TROY GENT: Was it worse than the fire department?

SCOTT BILLINGS: Oh, it was one hundred times worse.

It was thirteen hours of one mask with a second mask over it with goggles.

Then we had to wear these pappers, like incubator suits for thirteen hours on blacktop and tents in the parking lot in summer.

And I was like, "This sucks, man."

And all of my PTSD came back.

It got to the point where I couldn't even talk to anybody.

I wasn't sleeping.

As much as I didn't want to I had to leave that environment because I realized as I aged that you're not as resilient as you are at twenty.

You don't recover physically but you don't recover emotionally.

I realized it was probably time to tap out of critical care and go into something a little less stressful.

Getting regular sleep and then exercise has just been an absolute saving grace for me.

But it's really almost like bipolar or Jekyll and Hyde and Mindy will see it.

I will feel myself building in the morning and getting a lot of angst and a lot of aggression.

And I'll be like, "I gotta go work out now."

And she's like, "Yeah, go.

Go."

And I come back and I'm like, "Oh man," totally different person.

I was talking to my dad this week, he's an ex-military officer.

But he said one of his saving graces was always exercise too, even now at eighty.

He traumatized his ankle several years back.

He's like, “I can't really walk very well but if I don't exercise, I'm going to screw myself into the ground."

So I don't know if it runs in the genes or if it's military, police, and fire but he always learned to deal with it through exercise.

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SCOTT BILLINGS: I used to think that if you talked about your emotions or if you showed emotions, it was a weakness.

I had one guy say to me, he goes, "I tried to open up to the ten guys at the station the other day about something I was having a really hard time with and they all laughed at me."

He goes, "I'll never talk to anybody again."

I think that's part of the persona, the alpha male, is you don't show emotion.

You just bottle it and go.

Right?

And that's kind of the way, to some degree, my dad was always, he's just like, "Well, you deal with it.

Deal with it.

Suck it up, man."

I do have some of that but I've learned more now that it is okay to talk about some of the things you're scared about.

It is okay to talk about some of the things you're struggling with.

They say misery loves company but to know that somebody else is walking through a very tough road with you is comforting to know that you're not the only one that's the freak in the world.

That you're not the only one that's depressed.

That you're not the only one who has aggression problems.

That you're not the only one who raises his voice.

The therapy room was like literally the bathroom area.

They'd go in there in the morning, we would all shave, and start talking.

I would sit on the counter.

I talked to several guys for hours and they just talked and talked because they wanted to get it off their chest but they had no one to talk to about their wives, leaving them, about the problems, the struggles, the emotional...

And I just sit on the counter as they were shaving and they would literally...

I can't even tell you.

Hours.

And I was like, "Well, I'm okay with this.

They need this.

Right?

TROY GENT: Yeah, I agree.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Knowing that you're not walking through life alone is helpful.

Mindy would always be like, "Well, how was the day?"

"It was good.

I don't want to talk about it."

Like what am I going to do?

Sit down with her as much as I love her and say, "Well, you know when you go on those code calls or traumatic calls and you see like -"

How is she going to?

She can't relate.

But to talk to somebody else who lives it and walks it…

That means something.

And then to hear them say, "Hey, I'm really struggling too.

You're not alone."

That meant a lot to me because then I'm like, "Okay, I'm broken but it's not just and we can help each other."

But there wasn't a whole lot of that going on in the fire service.

Like we'd walk by each other but we wouldn't really stop and talk to each other.

It was isolating when you were tired and going through a lot rather than coming together and talking about things.

TROY GENT: Some of the traumatic things I've gone through…

After the trauma, a therapist or a program told me, “This is normal.”

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah.

TROY GENT: That just made me feel like, "Okay, I'm not a psychopath.

This is supposed to happen to people that go through this type of trauma."

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah and I remember walking for years, I'm not kidding you years on end, going, "I'm the only one that's broken.

All these guys are normal.

I'm the only one that's broken.

All these guys are normal."

TROY GENT: And they're thinking the same thing.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah until you sit down and talk and you realize the dude is medicating with alcohol, sleeping meds, other drugs, who knows to get through life.

His wife left him.

Holy shit, man.

This is a chronic problem.

One guy, after he left the department, he hung himself.

There were other guys talking about killing themselves, the other guys medicating, and I realized, "What are we doing to take care of each other?"

Well, not a whole lot.

When you're on the job, you're basically just existing and trying to survive.

You don't have any room for anybody else.

"Oh, tell me your problems."

You don't have any room for that.

You're dealing with all your own problems.

TROY GENT: Which is unfortunate because that's the very solution that's going to help with those problems.

But then we're thinking that way.

We're avoiding it but that's the very thing that we actually need to overcome the problem.

And if you show weakness, then are they going to trust you in a critical situation?

"I'm really struggling, man. Can you listen to me? Cause I -"

Well, what about when the shit hits the fan?

Are they really going to trust you or are they going to say, "Well, this guy's weak.

He's going to break."

And I remember after I retired, COVID hit and I was charge nurse.

I was talking to a coworker of mine.

Her husband was a captain in our department.

And I remember just talking with her in a room one day and I remember all this major stress and depression coming back.

And I just started crying and I said, "I'm not doing so well, Teresa.

I just feel so screwed up right now.

And she goes, "Scott, there's a lot of guys, when they leave the fire department, they really struggle with depression and identity issues.

You know, like my mom had told me when I was young, before she passed away, "Time heals all things."

I think for me it was getting away from that and then letting time heal me slowly.

I'm not perfect by any means but I am able to adjust and adapt to a lot of things better now.

But for me, sleep was huge.

Like if you don't get sleep, you don't deal well with anything in life.

TROY GENT: Is there anything else you'd like to share, Scott?

SCOTT BILLINGS: No, I think I've taken up half of your day.

TROY GENT: No, this is fantastic.

SCOTT BILLINGS: Yeah, I appreciate it, brother.

TROY GENT: Appreciate it.

PODCAST OUTRO: Thank you for listening.

Please tell your friends and family so that we can bring more joy and awareness to those struggling with suicide ideation and the families who desperately need help after the loss of someone they love to suicide.