How Quickly Things Can Change

I was on patrol late one afternoon when I was sent to a small fire outside a science building on a college campus. The fire department and I arrived at about the same time. A few minutes later the officer that was also assigned the call arrived. 

In minutes the fire was extinguished and all that was left was a small amount of smoke coming from the burned grass just outside a side door to the building. The fire department left the area, but I stayed a few more minutes to obtain information for my short report.

About 30 minutes after I went back out onto the streets, my lips started burning as did my nose and throat. Minutes later I also started having trouble breathing.  I contacted the other officer that had responded to the fire and found out he was also experiencing some of the same problems. I contacted my supervisor and requested to go to the hospital.

We both drove ourselves to the emergency room where they gave us special mouth wash to wash out our mouths and put us on straight oxygen for a while to clean out our lungs. We both went home for the day. We returned to the hospital the following morning for oxygen therapy and went back to work that afternoon.

After asking around the science building I determined students had been dumping chemicals from chemistry experiments outside that side door for many years. The fire apparently ignited ground that had been saturated with various chemicals. The chemicals were in the small amount of smoke that I had apparently inhaled. That is one of the reasons fires can be so dangerous, because we don’t always know what is burning.

This event just reinforced in my mind haw quickly things can change. I was fine one minute and it seems I was struggling to breathe the next. Life is short, how do we force ourselves not to waste any minute of it?

Until next time,

Sally S