[garage door whirring]
- Adam: When COVID hit, I felt like I was coming home
to expose my family almost every day
because I never knew what's a true exposure, right?
Was it on surfaces?
Was it in the air, right?
So I almost treated it as "It's bound to happen today."
My name is Adam Perez.
I've been a firefighter and a fire medic
for the city of Madison for roughly nine years.
And I'm from the city of Madison,
so it's actually really nice
to represent the community that I grew up in
and helping people along the way.
A lot of the time, people tend to think that firefighters
are like these big, strong-willed,
courageous people willing to do anything.
And when COVID hit, I felt like a lot of people
kinda came into their shell a little bit,
'cause they were like, "What are we getting into?"
This is very foreign to us.
This is something invisible.
We can't see it.
Everyone seems to be afraid of it.
People were dying from this like every day.
I felt like it was almost just a matter of time
that I was gonna have an exposure unbeknownst to me,
and then I was gonna potentially expose my family to that.
So for my kids, they greet me at the door
with open arms and smiles,
but maybe my kids wouldn't see me for a couple of days
because I had a pretty serious exposure.
And for that time period, we had to isolate,
and Dad needed to take time
to get rid of all the contaminants
that I was bringing home.
I was taking like two or three showers a day just to make sure
that I'm keeping my family out of harm's way.
Most of the days were pretty sad
because there were a lot of people that were dying
that we had to consider.
It was almost like a triage treatment.
For a virus, how do you tell somebody that "You're safe,"
not knowing that they're safe
or "You're not as bad as somebody else
that's really, really bad."
And going forward, maybe they were worse off
than you thought.
And then even with my crew mates,
we didn't have a whole lot of time to interact.
We had a lot of questions still that needed answering.
We were still very timid and afraid of what
we could potentially catch at work.
So for us, there were some sadder, darker days.
It felt like the whole city was starting to lose its wheels.
Everyone was starting to fall apart.
A lot of the time, we would see people
with difficulty breathing.
We try as much as we can,
but we are limited as to what we do.
There was an older gentleman.
He had some pre-existing conditions
due to long-term smoking, but we come to these patients
that just have such a hard time breathing.
And you can see that they're gasping for air.
They can't talk in complete sentences
because they're trying to catch their breath in between words.
It was something that they were very scared about.
It was just very scary to see
because they never knew if this was it,
if this was the end, right?
And you could kinda see that look on their face.
It's one of those things where you're just like,
we got to hope that we can just get these people
to the hospital fast enough
that we still have resources available for them.
We were very surprised how fast it would spread.
We were running multiple calls a day
and every call was a COVID call.
So it did spread really, really fast.
And for us, we just assumed that everyone had it,
had COVID at that time.
Once more information came out about the vaccine,
there was such a relief that we were over the moon,
I guess about the cases coming down.
And then you would think that like, "Okay,
"now things are gonna start to go back to normal,
but a diferent normal."
Science has just done so much.
When you start to open up your mind to some of the things
that we have been capable of in history, it's quite amazing.
Like, wow, we're really progressing as people
and that the potential for other cures
and other vaccines are virtually endless.
This is one of the scariest things
that we've had to deal with in humanity.
And we've adapted to it.
Our procedures have changed
and it's gonna help in the future.
We're adapting and we're getting better.
[gentle music]