That firefighter almost killed me.

Dear Chief Lieb,

While I have been an employee for Salt Lake City Public services for almost seven years, I am writing to you from my personal email because I am sending this as a private citizen to file a complaint about one of your firefighters. I do not write this casually or to “get back” at the individual in question for mistreating me, but because, as someone highly invested in ensuring the safety of the public and the city government’s role in that task, I feel concerned about this particular firefighter’s ability to contribute, and in fact, feel concerned he may be putting people in danger. My personal experience with him certainly didn’t make me feel safe.

On October 29th I came down with an illness which required me to stay home from work. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I was not well. My fiancée and I were confident that it was not Coronavirus because we had both come down with it two months earlier and because the symptoms were not similar. I stayed in bed, drank and ate what I could, and tried to wait it out.

On October 31st it became clear that I was not going to be able to do so. My first new symptom of the day was losing feeling in my extremities. My second new symptom was my hands and feet turning blue. My fiancée called a doctor when we noticed the issues, the doctor told her to get me to a hospital as soon as possible. Due to muscle weakness and pain I was unable to stand up, even with her assistance, and the three flights of stairs going down made other solutions equally impossible. We were forced to call 911 and ask for an ambulance.

Things went wrong almost immediately as the firefighting team was let into my apartment. The individual in question, who was either the most assertive of the bunch or held a leadership role, approached me first. He asked me what my symptoms were and without two sentences exchanged between us he said, “You don’t need to go to the hospital, you’re having a panic attack.”

When I expressed extreme doubt, he pressed on, saying that I started hyperventilating because I was nervous about having the flu. He was totally dismissive of my protests against his assessment. When the blood pressure machine was brought in and the results came back at ~60/40 (the borderline of getting enough blood to my brain to keep me conscious) he insisted that the machine was broken. My fiancée told him, despite his pushing, that the doctor gave explicitly orders to get me to the hospital. His response was, in a contemptuous tone, “I disagree.”

It wasn’t until my fiancée further insisted, and one of the other firefighters gratefully pushed against his assessment, that he agreed to help me. My fiancée and the second firefighter saved my life. 

I was helped into the back of the ambulance. The individual I’m complaining about let his coworkers do the hard work of getting me down the three sets of stairs, while he continued to speak casually about my condition. When the EMTs checked me they immediately could tell his assessment was incorrect. The EMTs themselves got quite nervous at how dire my situation was. They called to get the firefighter’s assistance, but he and the team had already left the scene, leaving the EMTs and myself abandoned.

It turns out that I had acute septic shock, which has a 40% mortality rate, increasing the longer it doesn’t get treated. This firefighter was wrong. I am incredibly grateful that the team of twelve doctors and nurses in the emergency room and the innumerable ICU doctors, nurses, and physical therapists for pulling me from death’s door and getting me onto the road to recovery. Finally, this week, I have felt up to writing you on this matter. Had even one other person treated me like the firefighter in question had, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the chance.

I got your contact information from a colleague in the city, but I pulled up your letter to the public to ensure I had your name right. In that letter, on the about page, you write:

“The goal of the Salt Lake City Fire Department is to promote safety and assist people in their time of crisis. We seek not only to make a good impression, but to provide the public peace of mind that their fire department is capable, ready, and willing to help them when they need it.”

This firefighter in question did not promote my safety and did everything he could to avoid assisting me. He made a horrible impression and almost robbed me of the piece of mind that when I call emergency services, I will be taken care of. I am healed and back to work, but I still think of how terrifying and infuriating it was to not be listened to by someone meant to ensure my safety. As I work with the public in my role at public services, it reminds me of how important it is to treat everyone with respect while I am doing my job. I am writing this letter to get some piece of mind, because if I don’t file this complaint and this firefighter does get someone killed, that will be on my conscious.

I do want to take a moment to talk about perception and interpretation for a moment. I stuck purely to the facts the best I could while describing the situation to you, but as people live in the moment-to-moment the pure facts aren’t the only thing that matters. When someone mistreats an individual it is normal for the victim to start wondering, “Why?” Why did he treat me this way? As I asked myself that my first theory was that he was lazy and some unconscious part of him didn’t want to do the work of helping me get down to ground level. My second theory was that he saw my Black Lives Matter poster on my front door, decided that I’m some sort of “liberal snowflake,” and decided I was overblowing things, like so-called “snowflakes” do. My third theory is that he was having a bad day, made a really stupid mistake, and stuck to his guns way too long out of arrogance (I practically guffaw every time I think about his idea that the blood pressure monitor was broken).

One or multiple of those theories could be right, but perhaps none of them are. I’m a rational person and I don’t like to fill-in-the-blanks with those sorts of interpretations if I can avoid it. However, I think most people do like to fill-in-the-blanks with an answer or a theory. As a public servant, part of the reason I treat every single individual with respect is because I know that people will otherwise make assumptions for why I mistreated them.

From a factual perspective let’s take the best possible assumption, that the firefighter gets grumpy and makes worse decisions when he’s hungry. He didn’t eat breakfast on the 31st because he forgets sometimes. If this sort of situation repeats and he gets called to a low-income area, “Did he mistreat me because I’m poor?” he gets called to help a person of color, “Did he mistreat me because of my skin color?” I worked with the Youth & Family Division for over five years and it makes me sick to imagine one of the kids I worked with thinking either of those things because a firefighter wasn't doing his job well. My personal interpretation doesn’t particularly matter, what matters is that he let the door open to these sorts of interpretations, and with that trust ends up broken.

Because I have been a public servant for so long and I’ve seen how the proverbial sausage gets made, trust hasn’t been completely broken for me. I don’t know if this individual needs additional training, if he needs to be disciplined or fired, or if it really was just a bad day. Allow me to express my hopes and expectations for the fire department on this matter:

1)      A good faith investigation will be done, and he will be identified. Below you will find my fiancee’s phone number from which the 911 call was made and our address. Between that information and knowing it occurred on 10/31 I presume your records will allow for this identification. I, of course, feel no desire to have his identity revealed to me and in fact I think he deserves his privacy.

2)      This complaint will be placed into his file so that if this is a pattern of behavior, either the beginning of something or a pattern which already exists, it will be tracked.

3)      The firefighter in question will be trained and/or disciplined as needed, as guided by both smart management and city procedure.

I would like to be informed that something was done, I’d love to tell those I have shared this story with that the department handled my situation effectively. Please pass my thanks on to the other emergency workers who were on the call, the ones who didn’t let him dominate the situation, I am incredibly thankful to them and to the fire department in general, with whom as a private citizen and a public employee I have had almost entirely good interactions with.

It is unfortunate I had to write this email, but there’s not much I can do when I feel compelled by duty. Please, in good faith, do your duty on this matter as well. The more public employees who are dedicated to duty we have, the less likely it is that the ones who are not get to besmirch our names. In the era where we are scrutinized more than ever, I think that’s pretty important.

The very best,

Scott Ryan Udall