Devin: I am a devoted husband, father of 3, Firefighter/Paramedic, musician, & YES! I’m a Mormon

I’m a paramedic firefighter for the city of Los Angeles. I really love being a firefighter paramedic. I love being in the thick of things. Everything’s chaotic and you kind of bring some order to that chaos in your training and I really love doing that, it’s what I trained for. There’s 106 fire stations and it doesn’t seem like it’s enough. Seems like it should be 500 fire stations. For 3000 employees to handle well over 4 million people…

Sadly though, one day all that changed for me. I suffered a heart attack. Actually I’ve had two heart attacks from ’07 to now, December of ’07 when I had a second one. I was removed from the field, which is to say no more firefighting or paramedic work which is very, very difficult for me. Gosh, I miss this! I miss being out there, working the paramedic work. I miss it a whole lot. It looks pretty crazy doing a job like that, but we love doing it.

We lost our home due to that difficulty and due to that loss of wages at that time. To see that go away was a tough deal. At this point, I changed my whole focus. I changed family life, I changed a lot of things. The job I have now is quite different. It involves working with the media and the public. Before, I was out there in the thick of things. And now, I’m behind the scenes. I’m heard but never seen.

I get to see everything that’s going on in the city, from stabbings to shootings to fires to car accidents, to deliveries of babies – I get to see them all! And that could be overwhelming sometimes, so it’s a different workload that you take home with you. So, on the drive home, I love listening to the Scriptures. That’s decompression for me and it puts me in the right frame of mind to think about spiritual things and that keeps my focus on the drive home so that, when I see my kids, I’m appreciative about not only what others have lost that day, be it that they lost their house to a fire – I can focus on those things and be happy that I have my family, my health and my happiness.

I’m a Los Angeles city firefighter paramedic.  My name is Devin Gales and I’m a Mormon.