Job Talk: November's Story

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Hero: Daws

Bio: A small town firefighter, giving to the community one call at a time

So when I first started at my current department we got a call for an 82 year old female who was having neck pain.

We show up and take the med bag in, and she’s just sitting there, smiling. She says, “Sorry I was embarrassed about the real reason, I just need help bottle feeding these kittens I found under my porch". We laugh it off and feed the kittens because we hadn’t been busy and she was very friendly, granted we had to literally scream at her because she was very hard of hearing.

Months go by and we get similar calls from her, every now and then some of us would visit her home on our off days. A few more weeks go by and we hadn’t heard from her in a bit, we kind of shrug it off until we get paged to her address, we show up with her in tears and being very self destructive. She was showing lots of signs that she had dementia and that it was progressing very quickly.

She didn’t recognize any of us even though she knew all of us by name just weeks ago. Lots of stuff was talked about and I kind of sat back and started thinking to myself while she’s speaking with another firefighter.

I over hear her say “I don’t remember any of you but I know I trust you”.

We ended up each adopting a cat from her.