The Personal Cost of a Career as a Firefighter Paramedic. Kyle Collins

Paul Pantani
Jan 12
13 min read

Trauma After the Uniform. Deputy Fire Chief Kyle Collins

With the responsibility as an Acting Captain, a firefighter once stood in the middle of a raging hillside fire, convinced he had just killed his own crew. The flames had gone from a few feet high to a wall of heat and light in seconds. The wind was throwing fire back at them. He told his firefighters to run for the engine, then watched the fire roll over, under, and around them. In that moment, he was already saying goodbye to his wife and kids in his head.

That moment sits inside a much longer story.

Kyle Collins grew up around technical rescue, rope work, and wilderness danger through his father’s work with the National Park Service. He chased risk early, training as a commercial hard-hat diver before walking away from that life to build a family. He worked his way through the fire service from paid-call firefighter to deputy fire chief, carrying the weight of pediatric deaths, suicides, and command-level pressure along the way. When he finally left the job, it wasn’t because he was done with the work, it was because the work was done with him. His transition out, his struggle with identity, and his reckoning with trauma reveal what many firefighters and first responders recognize but rarely say out loud.

Give a listen to Episode 230 by pushing play below, while you keep reading,

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From Hard Hat Diver to Becoming a Paramedic / Firefighter

Kyle Collins didn’t grow up dreaming about fire engines or being a paramedic. He grew up around ropes, cliffs, and people who didn’t flinch when things went wrong.

He was raised in Lakewood, California, and spent his early years watching his father work for the National Park Service. His dad wasn’t sitting behind a desk. He was doing technical rescues, climbing, rope work, and wilderness operations. That kind of work puts danger right in front of you. You see what happens when someone slips. You also see the calm that has to show up when someone else’s life is hanging off a line.

That became normal.

Kyle didn’t talk about it like a calling. It was just what he saw growing up. Risk was part of the landscape, not something to avoid. It made sense, then, that he’d chase his own version of that world.

By the time he was a young man, he was training as a commercial hard-hat diver. That’s not recreational diving. That’s industrial, underwater, zero-margin-for-error work. It’s dark, cold, and dangerous. It’s the kind of job that attracts people who don’t mind being alone in a hostile place if the work needs to get done.

That path fit him.

But then something else entered the picture. He met the woman who would become his wife.

And just like that, the trajectory shifted.

Kyle walked away from diving. He didn’t talk about it as a dramatic sacrifice, but the meaning is hard to miss. He stepped away from a high-risk, adrenaline-driven career to build a life with someone else. That was the first time he chose stability over danger. It wasn’t because the work scared him. It was because commitment mattered more.

After that, he took a job running printing presses. It wasn’t glamorous. It was steady. He did it for eight to ten years. Long enough to build a routine. Long enough to have kids. Long enough to settle into what adult responsibility looks like when you aren’t chasing danger for a living.

He and his wife got married in 1984. They started raising their family.

From the outside, it looked like a normal working-class life in Southern California. Inside, something still itched.

The fire service didn’t appear in his life through some childhood dream or dramatic moment. It came through a coworker. Someone he worked with told him about firefighting as a career path. It wasn’t a speech. It was just information. But it landed.

Kyle already understood physical risk. He understood teamwork. He understood what it meant to show up when things were ugly. The idea of doing that for a living, in a way that actually helped people, stuck with him.

So he asked questions.

And he got a blunt answer.

A fire captain told him flat out that if he wanted to get hired, he needed to become a paramedic. Firefighting without paramedic credentials wasn’t going to get him in the door. That wasn’t encouragement. It was a gate.

Kyle took it seriously.

Deciding to become a paramedic wasn’t just a career move. It was a family decision. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He had a wife. He had children. Training meant time and money, neither of which was sitting around unused.

So he did something that most people don’t like to admit.

He moved his family into his parents’ house.

It wasn’t temporary in the casual sense. It was a full reset. A grown man, with a wife and kids, choosing to live under his parents’ roof so he could go to paramedic school. It was a step backward on paper. It was a step forward for where he was trying to go.

He enrolled at Daniel Freeman Paramedic School in 1990.

He didn’t just get through it.He finished first in his class.

That matters, not because it looks good on a résumé, but because of what it says about where his head was. He wasn’t dabbling. He wasn’t half-in. He went all the way in.

Around that same time, he got hired by the Chino Valley Fire Department through San Bernardino County Fire. He also went through the Mt. SAC Fire Academy. He was building the foundation of a fire service career while still carrying the weight of being a husband and a father who’d just uprooted his family to make it happen.

Those early decisions weren’t flashy.

They were heavy.

Kyle didn’t talk about them like heroic moves. He talked about them as what had to be done. But there’s a pattern there. Every time something meaningful came into his life, he made choices that narrowed his options. He left diving for his wife. He left financial independence to go back to school. He put his family inside his parents’ home so he could step into a profession that didn’t guarantee anything.

There’s a quiet courage in that kind of commitment.It doesn’t look good in a movie.It shows up in everyday pressure.

By the time he finished paramedic school and went through the fire academy, he wasn’t chasing an image of firefighting. He was chasing a chance to make a life that felt real, useful, and anchored to something bigger than a paycheck.

What he didn’t know yet was how much of himself that choice was going to cost.

Learning the Job While It Learns You: Entering the Fire Service

Kyle didn’t ease into firefighting. He dropped into it with everything he had.

By the time he finished paramedic school and went through the Mt. SAC Fire Academy, he was already balancing more than most recruits. He had a wife. He had kids. He was living with his parents to make the math work. There wasn’t room for failure. Passing wasn’t optional. Getting hired wasn’t a hope, it was the plan.

Before all of that, he’d already spent five years as a paid call firefighter with the Manhattan Beach Fire Department from 1985 to 1990. That wasn’t full-time career status. It was showing up when you were called, learning the job on someone else’s schedule, proving you belonged without any promise of long-term stability. It was a way into the culture, not a guarantee of staying.

When he finally got hired by Chino Valley Fire in 1990, the stakes changed. Now he wasn’t just training. He was responsible.

He took his place on the line. He became a firefighter-paramedic, first assigned to a squad and later to an engine. That meant he wasn’t just putting wet stuff on red stuff. He was running medical calls. He was pronouncing deaths. He was working on kids, on burn victims, on people who didn’t survive their worst day.

That kind of work doesn’t wait for you to feel ready.

Early in his career, Kyle started seeing what emergency medicine really looks like when it’s happening in living rooms and on sidewalks. Pediatric calls. Fatal accidents. Burn injuries. He didn’t separate those things into categories. They all stacked up the same way. One after another, with no time to sit with any of them.

One call broke through in a way he couldn’t ignore.

He responded to a pediatric death involving an eight-year-old who had been struck by a car. The call itself was bad. What made it worse was what happened after. He went home and saw his own eight-year-old son run into the street. The danger wasn’t theoretical anymore. His brain couldn’t tell the difference between the child he couldn’t save and the one he loved.

He lost control.

Kyle said he “lost my ever loving mind.” He screamed at his son. He frightened him. He frightened the neighbors. Later, he admitted that he traumatized his own child in that moment.

That’s not something most firefighters talk about. It’s not part of the job description. But it’s part of the job.

From that point on, the line between work and home wasn’t as clean as it had been before. He became hyper-alert around his kids. Normal childhood behavior felt like a threat. Running into the street wasn’t just a kid being a kid anymore. It was a replay of a death scene he couldn’t get out of his head.

The job was teaching him something he didn’t ask to learn.

He was good at what he did.He showed up. He carried the weight. He handled the calls.

But the cost was already starting to show up at home.

Those early years also shaped how he saw responsibility. As a firefighter-paramedic, you’re often the last person someone sees alive. You’re the one holding the airway, pushing the drugs, trying to reverse the damage that’s already been done. When it works, it feels like a miracle. When it doesn’t, it feels like a failure, even when it isn’t.

Kyle didn’t talk about those moments in technical terms. He talked about how they stayed with him. How they stacked up. How they followed him out of the station and into his living room.

He was still early in his career, but the pattern was already there. Calls didn’t end when the rig got back to quarters. They kept going.

That’s the part a lot of people outside the fire service don’t see. You don’t just respond and reset. You respond, you clean up, you rest for a few minutes, and then you go again. There’s no space between the worst moments of other people’s lives.

Kyle was building a career in a world where the next call could always be worse than the last one. He was also building a family in a house where his kids were growing up, laughing, running, and living the kind of normal life that didn’t exist on the other side of the station doors.

Those two worlds were already starting to collide.

By the time he’d settled into his role on the engine, he wasn’t just a guy learning a trade. He was a firefighter who had already learned how quickly the job could reach into his personal life and take something from it.

That realization didn’t slow him down. It just became part of what he carried.

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Promoting to Deputy Fire Chief While the Weight Keeps Growing

Kyle kept moving in his career.

About thirteen years into his career, he was promoted to engineer. Not long after that, around his fifteenth year, he made captain. He stayed there for seven or eight years, which meant he wasn’t just riding the rig anymore. He was responsible for the crew. Their safety. Their decisions. Their mistakes. Their families, even if no one said it out loud.

Later, he moved up again to battalion chief. Then, in the final three years of his career, he became a deputy fire chief.

On paper, that’s a clean arc. Firefighter to engineer. Engineer to captain. Captain to Deputy Chief.

But real life inside those roles doesn’t move in straight lines.

At the time of his retirement, Kyle was responsible for seven stations. He was number 2 in command. He was dealing with politics, labor issues, and the constant pressure that comes with being the person who has to make decisions when no one else wants to.

He wasn’t just fighting fire anymore. He was managing risk.

He was also still carrying everything he’d seen on the line. Pediatric deaths. Burn victims. Fatal accidents. Suicides. Those calls didn’t disappear when he left the engine. They just changed where they lived.

As a leader, he became hypervigilant. Protective of his people. Always scanning for what could go wrong.

He worried about his crews. He felt responsible not just for their performance, but for their survival. That kind of pressure doesn’t show up in a policy manual, but it’s there every time a chief signs off on a decision that puts firefighters in harm’s way.

One incident earlier in his career made that reality impossible to ignore.

As an Engineer, Kyle was Acting Captain in charge of a strike team during the Esperanza Fire. It was an overtime crew. All experienced firefighters. He was waiting to promote to captain full time.

The night before, five firefighters had been burned alive on that same fire. Everyone knew it. Everyone felt it.

The conditions were bad. Santa Ana winds.High fire behavior. Strike teams moving to all boundaries of the fire.

Kyle's team was assigned to hold the east side of the fire, mid-slope on a dirt road through the night. At first, the flames were manageable. Three to four feet, and close but not too close. The fire engine was not parked in an optimal spot.

Then the fire changed.

The flames jumped to eight or ten feet without warning. The wind started throwing flame. Kyle ordered his crew back to the rig. The firefighters had to run a hundred feet through fire just to get to it.

The fire rolled over them. Under them. Around them.

They deployed two hoselines and used the engine as cover. Water was being blown back by the wind. In that moment, Kyle was sure he had just killed his crew.

He thought about his wife. He thought about his kids. He apologized to them in his head.

He believed the responsibility was his.

Then, just like that, the fire was gone. It moved away.

The engine was still there. The crew was still there.

They survived.

That kind of moment doesn’t end when the flames go out. It becomes part of how you see everything after. Kyle didn’t say it turned him into someone else, but it deepened what was already there. The fear of losing firefighters on his watch. The need to control what couldn’t really be controlled.

As he continued through his career, he promoted higher. He earned a bachelor’s degree. He did it while working full time. He did it at fifty years old. That wasn’t about a promotion. It was about proving to himself that he could still push.

But the strain was adding up.

He was working fifteen to sixteen hour days. He had a long commute. He was exhausted. He was dealing with unions, city politics, and the emotional fallout of every decision that didn’t make everyone happy.

He also knew mental health resources existed. He handed out EAP cards to his people. He encouraged them to use them.

He never used them himself.

His marriage was strained. He was irritable. He was worn down.

At some point, the job stopped being something he could carry.

Kyle said he knew he wasn’t well. He couldn’t deal with people anymore. He couldn’t deal with politics. He couldn’t keep doing what the role demanded.

So he made a decision that didn’t look like a win.

He retired before he maxed his retirement, and likely before becoming the Chief.

That’s where the career part of the story breaks. Not because he failed, but because he finally stopped pretending he could hold it all.

After the Sirens Stop: Losing the Job, Finding What Was Left

Kyle Collins retired in December 2019.

That date matters, because what came next wasn’t what he expected.COVID hit almost immediately. Whatever picture he had of easing out of the fire service, reconnecting with people, and figuring out what was next didn’t get a chance to happen. The world shut down. So did a lot of the routines that might’ve helped him land on his feet.

What he felt first wasn’t relief. It was absence.

He talked about the loss of camaraderie. The brotherhood. The feeling of being part of something that mattered. People at the department kept moving. Calls kept coming in. He didn’t.

He found himself calling the station just to get “information dumps.” He wanted to hear what was happening. Not because he needed to know, but because he needed to feel connected to the world he’d spent most of his life inside.

That’s when something uncomfortable became clear.

His identity wasn’t where he thought it was.

Kyle had always considered himself a man of faith. But after he retired, he realized his real identity had been his uniform and his rank. When those were gone, there wasn’t much left holding him together. He said, “That’s no longer who I am,” and he didn’t mean it with confidence. He meant it with uncertainty.

He was floundering. He was embarrassed.

Those are hard words for a former deputy fire chief to say out loud.

At first, he tried to handle it the way a lot of first responders do. He pushed. He waited. He hoped it would pass. But it didn’t. The pain of staying the same eventually became worse than the fear of changing.

That’s when he reached out for help.

Kyle entered EMDR therapy with Brett Ryan, a therapist who specializes in working with veterans and first responders, and who has also been a guest on the podcast (Episode . He didn’t walk in thinking he was carrying a lifetime of trauma. He thought there were a few calls that stuck with him.

When his Brett asked him to list his worst calls, he came up with twenty-five.

That surprised him.

They started working through them, one by one. A suicide of a young girl connected to memories of his sister. Deaths that he’d tucked away. Scenes he’d never really let himself feel. As they went deeper, something else came up.

Guilt.

Kyle realized he’d been blaming himself for people who died, even when there was nothing he could’ve done. That belief had been sitting under everything. Under his hypervigilance. Under his anger. Under his exhaustion.

“I felt responsible for not being able to save them,” he said.

That’s a heavy thing to carry for decades.

He also had to face something else. He couldn’t get through it on his own. He said, “I just couldn’t get there on my own,” and it wasn’t said lightly. It was said after trying.

There wasn’t a clean ending to that process. There still isn’t. But there was a shift. Instead of pretending the job hadn’t marked him, he started acknowledging how deeply it had.

That matters for other firefighters, medics, and first responders reading this.

Kyle didn’t leave because he hated the work. He left because the work had taken more than he realized. His advice isn’t a slogan. It’s an observation. You can carry things longer than you should.

You can convince yourself you’re fine when you’re not. You can lead others while quietly falling apart.

Getting help doesn’t make you weaker. It just makes the truth harder to avoid.

Kyle’s story doesn’t end with a neat resolution. He’s still rebuilding who he is without the radio, the station, and the title. But he’s doing it with more honesty than he had before.

Closing

Kyle Collins didn’t walk away from the fire service because he stopped caring. He walked away because caring had finally caught up to him. His story isn’t about a rise through the ranks or a dramatic exit. It’s about what happens when a life built around service, danger, and responsibility suddenly loses the structure that held it together. He learned early how to live with risk, and later how to lead people through it. What he didn’t learn until much later was how much of himself he’d been spending along the way. For firefighters, medics, and anyone who’s worn a uniform, his journey feels familiar in a quiet way. It’s not a warning. It’s a recognition of what the job gives, and what it quietly takes back.

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