S6 E15 When The Mission Is Impossible with Guest Kevin Hazzard

Kevin Hazzard spent a decade running calls in the worst sections of Atlanta — and what he learned there is at the core of everything he's written since. Three books. One relentless refusal to let the people who run toward the worst of it go unwitnessed.

He brought to light the buried legacy of Freedom House EMS — the Black men who invented modern paramedicine, set the gold standard for emergency medicine worldwide, and were then discarded from the story they authored. And then he took us 40,000 feet above the Atlantic, to the most dangerous air-medical rescue in history.

Picture this: a crew locked inside a plane with two Ebola-infected Americans, somewhere over the ocean — no protocols to guide them, no precedent to follow, treating one of the most infectious diseases on earth at cruising altitude. A real-world Mission Impossible. Except someone took the mission anyway.

In this episode, we talk about what the work does to you, what gallows humor is actually for, when it's time to hang up the radio, and why the people who built emergency medicine are still being discarded — just like the Freedom House medics were.

In this episode:

• How Kevin found his way into EMS — and what kept him there for a decade

• What dark humor in A Thousand Naked Strangers reveals about survival — and what clinicians misunderstand when they pathologize it

• The moment Kevin knew it was time to walk away from the ambulance

• Locked in a plane with Ebola, no protocols, 40,000 feet over the Atlantic — what that rescue actually looked like from the inside

• Freedom House EMS: the forgotten architects of emergency medicine, and what their erasure says about how we still treat first responders today

**Resources for Responder Wellness:**

• Book: Helping the Helpers https://a.co/d/dm0VS4Q

• Free App: CRACKYL http://crackyl.respondertv.com

• Fitness: FightCamp (code RR10 for 10% off) https://joinfightcamp.com/shop/ 

Contact Kevin Hazzard:
Website: http://kevinhazzard.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kevin.hazzard.96
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goes_by_hazzard/

Contact Responder Resilience:
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Our website with past episodes and more: https://www.respondertv.com/
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