It was just before Christmas, when Battalion Chief Chris Burger responded to a call of an unresponsive infant.
With the sort of muscle memory training only thousands of hours of training can build, he went to the home and did his job. He was the helper — cool under pressure, someone you can lean on — that everyone expects a firefighter to be.
But afterwards, it weighed on him. He thought of his daughter. The horror of what it would be like to spend Christmas without her.
“It weighs heavy on you,” he said. “Overtime, you are repeatedly exposed to things you really shouldn’t be looking at ... but at the end of the day, you’re the same as everyone else.”
Burger couldn’t shake it off, so he did something that would have been unprecedented when he first started fighting fires in the 90s: He called someone to talk about it, the critical incident stress management (CISM) team in Bay County.