"The Job Isn’t Just About You — It’s About Your Family, Too"

Those in Emergency Services are selfish. They are. They go to work, day in and day out, answering calls, handling complex and stressful situations without much thought about their effect on your family. Countless times while on a break at home with the family for a meal, the radio would go off where you are dispatched to a civil where there are weapons, a serious accident, a CPR call, a fire with an entrapment, and you drop everything and head out the door kissing your spouse hearing, “Be careful.” and “I love you.”. They hear the call, and you head out to a dangerous situation without missing a beat. No thought is given to how your family is feeling. An entire career of this, and it never clicks. How does this affect my family? Do they worry? Well, of course they do. They love and care for you! You don’t realize its effects on your family until you retire, and then it hits you all at once. It happened to me, and I felt ashamed. Ashamed because I was selfish. Here I am, almost living a double life with my other family, while my family was at home, carrying on with life.

A little about me. I was in Law Enforcement for 26-plus years and loved it! When I met my future wife, I was already a Police Officer with about 1/3 of my career completed. I was very involved with my department, which was a large part of my life. She understood this and, as time passed, she understood there would be times when work would be more important. Sounds cold, right? Emergencies don’t stop for families. After dating for two years, we became engaged, and a year and 10 months later, we married. Within a year, we were expecting our first child, a daughter. After our first daughter was born, I worked evenings while she worked days due to childcare. Within 4 years, daughter number two arrived. It worked but, as a couple, it was difficult at times. Two ships passing in the fog, but we put in the time and effort to make our time together the best it could be. Finances or running a family. Being there for family events. If work didn't pull me away, I was fortunate to come home for dinner to see my wife and daughters. We had to cram in dinner while discussing our day within 45 minutes. I never took work stress home and, since we both put in a lot of effort, things were always good at home.

I was fortunate enough to retire at a young age. Due to changing economics in my state, it made more sense to retire than to go to work and pay more for benefits and my pension. At first, I hated the idea. Here I was, working a job I loved, at a seniority level that gave me preference on where in town I wanted to work, take time off when I wanted, and was able to choose what schedule I wanted to work, and I was getting the boot. I was unhappy and pretty upset at the time, but I knew it was the right thing to do financially and, most importantly, for my family.

When I retired, we celebrated with a party with my squad, a number of supervisors who I worked with during my career, my Chief, who was also my friend, close friends, and my family. I made a teary speech and thanked everyone for the great times working together. It was more difficult than I thought. Everyone clapped, we made a toast, and my wife stood up to say a few words. She praised me for being so committed to the job, called me her hero, and thanked those still working. Then she said, being the wife of a Police Officer was difficult. The stress of watching me run off to hot calls, hearing the radio go off, and hearing the dispatcher sending officers to terrible calls was tough. She felt like a single mom at times because of the job. BOOM…. That hit me like a ton of bricks, and I went numb. I froze and was unable to say anything. I stood there thinking about how I acted when I excitedly headed out the door, going to hot calls. My attitude was that it was probably nothing, but I was always on alert that it could be something. I just didn’t show them that I was on alert. I sort of acted that way because it usually was not that bad, and I didn’t want to worry her or my kids. Here I am trying not to worry her; she was getting even more worried.

In the end, everything came together. Even though I was a Crime Scene Evidence Technician and worked for a department with over 160 officers that exposed me to a lot of bad stuff, I didn’t suffer any PTSD from the job because I was somehow able to leave it at the job. Sadly, others were not as lucky. I witnessed high divorce rates, alcohol abuse, anger, the breakdown of friendships, poor health, and in some cases, being forced unwillingly to leave the profession. Keeping it all together took some work. It may sound morbid, but I used humor to shove all that bad stuff to the back of my brain. It was present, but I was emotionally detached from it. I never had nightmares about the horrible incidents I was exposed to. Somehow, it worked for me, but each person is different. There is no magic potion that works across the board. Call it a mindset? Call it survival? Call it luck or blame it on how we all are wired. Stress can be experienced in many ways, and handling it as soon as it starts affecting you is important. Whether it be family, friends, or financial, as time goes on, stress will be more and more difficult to control. Understanding the cues will help you identify when others are going through some bad times, enabling you to assist them.

Article by Christopher Raia, Retired