Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios
Welcome to Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios! Get ready to dive into a world where safety meets storytelling! Drawing from his rich background as a former firefighter, EMT and safety expert, Jimmy brings you straight into the heart of safety and emergency preparedness. Episodes feature easy-to-understand tips, real-life stories, and interviews with experts, all designed to help you protect yourself, your business, and those you care about.
Whether it's advice on navigating everyday safety challenges or insights into the latest in health and safety trends, let this podcast educate and entertain you. Join Jimmy and level-up your safety knowledge with engaging discussions that could one day save a life.
Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios
Meet the Team! The Instructor Podcast Takeover Episode
All 3 of our instructors on the same podcast?!? Inconceivable!
Meet our team of instructors at Life Safety like never before! In this fascinating episode Jimmy, Megan, and Miguel, share their unique, and undoubtedly interesting paths to becoming EMTs—and eventually, trainers.
Ever wonder how organ donation and EMT school could intersect? Miguel’s journey includes not just EMT training but a stint in a job he accidentally applied for—as an organ and tissue recovery technician. From being told he’d just be handling paperwork to suddenly getting a surgical scalpel (and a job title that sounded way less intense), Miguel offers an inside look at a role you may have never heard of before.
This week's stories paint a picture of what makes the Life Safety Team so extraordinary—and entertaining! So go grab your earbuds and listen in to get to know our team of instructors who bring your safety training to life.
Life Safety Associates specializes in emergency response training for corporate ERT Teams. We help businesses create competent and confident first responders who are ready to handle unexpected emergencies. For more information you find us @lifesafetyassoc or email@lifesafety.com.
I gave you a countdown even.
Jimmy:The countdown was three, two, nothing. That's how you do it, because if you say one when you hit it, then you hear the one on the recording.
Miguel:You're supposed to say one and then hit it.
Megan:That is not how that works.
Miguel:I don't know how this works. Okay, you know more than me. That's what I thought.
Jimmy:Well, megan does do theater and shit, so that's why we let her run the laptop. Well, what's happening? It's your boy, jimmy, with Megan, and we've got a special guest, miguel, with us today in the Life and Safety podcast we're going to be doing a little Q&A let's get to know each other podcast. You all hear about me a lot and by the listeners. I know it's mostly my family that listens, so you're probably tired of hearing about me. So we're going to talk to Megan and our newest instructor, miguel, say hi.
Miguel:Hi, hello, my name is Miguel, as Jimmy mentioned.
Jimmy:All right, perfect. So, with that being said, we're going to go around and we're all going to tell each other where we went to EMT school at the first time. Okay, well, because I think I'm the only one that's actually old enough to have gone through it multiple times, and so we'll start with me and then we'll ask, we'll go to Megan, and then we'll ask Miguel. So I went to EMT school the first time at Lake Tahoe Community College in Southlake.
Megan:I went at San Jose City College.
Jimmy:Where'd you go?
Miguel:Went to West Coast EMS down in Orange County.
Jimmy:West Coast EMS. Yeah, that is a very original name?
Miguel:Yeah, that's what it's called. Now they move themselves to the Angel Stadium. It's where they have their school now.
Jimmy:Where the Angels are.
Miguel:In Anaheim, mm.
Jimmy:Angels are Nice, very cool. Are they still called West Coast?
Miguel:Yeah. Yes, they still are.
Jimmy:So the next quick question is you know, one of our first early podcasts was how do you become an EMT? I think that was podcast number two, where we asked Megan her journey and I think we asked why you became an EMT. And so go back and listen to podcast two, I believe it is. I think I've seen one, it might even be the first one, One or two and you'll hear those answers for Megan. But, Miguel, I'm going to ask you why did you become an EMT and what was kind of the process you went through at West Coast EMS?
Miguel:Yeah, so I was in college at that time, going to cal state, la, and I was trying to get into the nursing program. Uh, during that time, and they kept telling me that if I joined, either it was became an emt or cna. I would get more points towards being able to get in. During that time as well, my brother-in-law at the time kept trying to be a firefighter but he kept failing his EMT class. So I was like, well, let me go ahead and try the EMT one, because I didn't imagine myself being a CNA. And I was like, let me take the class with him so that way I could help him see what was going on, which I attempted. It took the class, still was the only one who made it through without him. Yeah, no, sorry.
Jimmy:We probably shouldn't laugh at his brother-in-law.
Miguel:No, you're good. No you're good, it was already his third try. It was his third try. No, you're good, You're good. And that's why I said at the time it was my brother-in-law Got it, Got it. Yeah, At the time it doesn't matter anymore, but during that time I really, really tried helping him, studied with him and everything. But we were doing good until that final test. Right before the final he failed it and that's when they kicked him out before his skills.
Jimmy:But yeah, failed has written last final written test. Yeah, ouch.
Miguel:Yeah, yeah.
Megan:I mean, EMT school is hard but I feel like it's good that it's hard because it you know you don't want somebody who the way that it was always explained to me was you had to maintain an 80% in the class or above, because you don't want somebody who got a 60 taking care of you on your worst day. True, you know I can 60. I can save your life 60.
Miguel:I know 60 of what I need to know.
Jimmy:Yeah, so I'm a little different than that. I think the 80 is good. I think you should have a high standard. But if somebody can do the skill and the assessment at a hundred percent but they can't memorize facts very good and they can barely maybe squeak by the test at like 70 percent, I'd rather have the person that could do an assessment and treat the person than tell me you know microbiology that you have to learn the first two weeks of EMT school.
Miguel:Yeah, he was he was that person hands on he was great. he'd read what he had to do hands on. He was able to do it a lot better than I could because I was more of a nervous person. If I'm told to do hands on and you're going to grade me, I tend to freeze up, but test wise is what always got him. I guess it was just the nerves. Nervous person like I'm told to hands on and you're gonna grade me, I tend to freeze up, but test wise is what always got him. I guess it was just the nerves because when I would test him beforehand he knew the information, he knew the whys and everything is just, I guess, the nervousness that he already taken it by the third time already
Jimmy:Yeah, yeah now I believe there was an actual cap on how many times you could take EMT school. I was, I went to school, which was a long time ago.
Megan:There's a cap, at least at where I went, you could take it three times.
Megan:and if you failed at that program three times you could go to a different program, but you were capped at three times in the same program.
Jimmy:Yeah, I think it was something like that for us too. I don't remember exactly what it was.
Miguel:Yeah, I think he had done it at a college down there, at rio hondo college first, and that's when he went to west coast. But I think the bad time during the time I took it was typically we had a class of like 30 and usually maybe like 25 would be the ones that go through this one.
Miguel:We had maybe 10 to 15 only go through that year and, uh, that same year was the year that the instructor was fired because he liked to tell more stories than anything and he was always on his energy drinks because he had always been up like 24 hours beforehand. So they blamed it on the fact that he wasn't really instructing anything, but they didn't do anything to help those that may have been able to pass if they had an actual instructor. That's tough, because it was more self-studying than anything. That is tough.
Jimmy:That is tough. So a lot of the team, you know a lot of people have heard it from us that you know my journey, you know EMT school straight into firefighting, work on the ambulances, fire academy, so on and so forth. Megan's story has been told EMT school, Heart condition, Heart condition Teaching, Teaching, Still going to school, and so what's kind of your path to life safety, Miguel. So what did you do? Because I really want to get into what you did before, since EMT school and before you got to life safety.
Miguel:So tell us a little bit about the job you had before you got here, so maybe from the beginning or right straight to.
Jimmy:Just that one job that I wanted.
Miguel:One job, all right. So there was one specific job. After I left uh, being an emt for a while, I moved into an organ and tissue donation company. I worked in uh was redlands, california with a company down there. I worked there for a year. My job specifically was working in those operating rooms harvesting the tissue and some organs that were going to be used for donation.
Jimmy:So how did you leave? Like, how did you find out about that job? Like, how do they advertise You're not going to the Craigslist back page and finding organ harvesting jobs and if you do, it's probably not the same type of thing we're talking about, right?
Miguel:Definitely not.
Jimmy:So did you. I kind of got the impression that you got that job by literally being the driver of said donation and then you kind of grew into that like cutting part or how did that?
Miguel:work. No, actually it's the complete opposite. I first ambulance company I worked at uh, I had met someone there, a buddy of mine and then sort of drifted to different companies from there, but I ended up running into him at a hospital one day. We were dropping off same patient at the hospital and hadn't seen him in a while, so I started talking to him.
Jimmy:You were dropping off patients at the same time. Yeah, not the same patient. No, because that would have been weird. Why would I? Because you would have had like half the patient in your ambulance and the other half the patient in the other ambulance.
Miguel:No, it would have been funny, though, but had where I've shown up and it's like two different ambulance companies writing for the same patient.
Jimmy:yeah, well, that's. Yeah, that's different.
Miguel:We had we each had our own uh patient. Yeah, we were arriving to drop him off at the hospital. Uh, when I uh ran into him again, I started talking with him. Uh, he had told me that someone else we had mutually worked with had was working at a at a company, at that company at the time that did the organ and tissue donation, and he had gotten my buddy at that time a job. He was about to start it too, and that's when he started telling me about it. Now, it wasn't the actual being the person in the harvest in the operating room, it was more so the person going to the hospitals and checking those reports and getting possible patients to be able to be donors is what he had first told me. So I decided to apply.
Miguel:That time I was trying to keep afloat the house that I had just gotten figured I could try something new, something a little more of a stepping, stepping higher up, basically. So I applied and everything. I got the job, but then they were I guess they got a mix-up on which one I was applying for. They were like oh, I'm sorry, were you applying for the one that was good, like the job that's supposed to go to the hospital to gather up that information, or you're applying for the one that's supposed to be to the hospital to gather up that information, or are you applying for the one that's supposed to be in the operating rooms?
Miguel:And my question to the lady on the phone was like which one pays more and which one does what? Like I'm not confused. She's like oh, which one did you apply for? I was like tell me which one is better and I'll tell you which one I applied for. She told me a little bit of both and she's like well, now you're on the phone, which one do you prefer? I mean, you already applied for it. She's like might as well tell me which one you prefer. And I was just like well, the other one sounds interesting. And I still had my idea of I'm gonna go ahead and help a surgeon do all. This is what I had my idea first day on the job. They were like no, you're gonna help package everything, basically set up everything. And then from there they were like no, you're the one actually doing all the work. That's when I was just like oh, this was even better than what I initially was applying for.
Megan:What extra training did you have, any extra training for that?
Miguel:No, all they said was you needed to have some medical terminology knowledge. That's it. So if you knew anatomy, they were like okay.
Jimmy:That's wild.
Jimmy:So, let's go back a step here, because that's crazy. So you're thinking I'm going to walk into this place, get a job, saying hey, this is the paperwork, this is the person I need to pick up X, y, z, take them to ABC, so on and so forth. Places there's I'm going to say not as maybe dot of the I's cross the T's kind of a place. They get confused. Or maybe you made a mistake and now you have to know I don't know, I'm just putting this out there and they're like, yeah, so which job do you want? And then they give you the scalpel and say go cut bodies. That's what I'm hearing.
Miguel:Yeah, basically, oh jeez, they were telling me a certain title and I was like that doesn't sound like the title I had applied for, am I like? Are we sure we're talking to the right miguel? I was like maybe there's a different one and they're like, no.
Jimmy:I gotta ask what was the job title? Was it like body farmer or is it, like you know, tissue harvester? No, technician level one, like what are we talking about right now.
Miguel:It was a surgical recovery technician.
Jimmy:Surgical recovery technician.
Megan:I would imagine there were so many more qualifications needed than just knowing anatomy?
Miguel:No, it was more so having like probably, maybe like degree in like science or something, but the fact that I had also had that emt background and had some college. At that time they were like, well, pretty sure you'd be able to grasp everything that we need, and they basically start you at the bottom. So it's not like, like you said, jimmy, where they're like here's a scalpel, walk in and do what you got to do. They start you at the bottom and they start teaching you more anatomy and specific of what you're going to be doing.
Jimmy:What's the bottom line? You're only allowed to cut like fingernails. Like what are we talking about?
Miguel:The bottom is mostly basically all the work no one else wants to do, which is you're going to be packing all the equipment you're going to need, you're going to be setting up all the room itself and then afterwards you're cleaning up. That's where you're starting. Why? Because it exposes you to are you even able to do a job like that? Sure, are you even going to handle it? In a sense,
Jimmy:I'm not. I don't do that in my life.
Megan:It actually sounds really fun. I will say
Jimmy:You are a little morbid
Megan:I'm very yeah, yeah.
Miguel:And then, like like day one, they go through that orientation to where you'll be looking powerpoints and they'll be talking everything. And then, like by third day, they're like are you still sure? And you're like, yeah, from what you've heard you're still sure. You'd be like yeah, and they'll be like, okay, we're gonna sit you in on one and if you can handle it we'll continue, and if not, you're good to say you don't want to do it. And then you basically sit in and you watch. You watch whatever is going on in that operating room at that time, whatever they're going to be doing.
Jimmy:That's interesting, that's interesting.
Miguel:Yeah, you basically learn everything they do in like those surgical operating rooms. On any other surgical case You've got to learn all of that how to keep yourself sterile, how to keep yourself out of the way of other people, like keeping everything basically clean, and then how to clean up afterwards.
Jimmy:Wild. Well, next time you have Miguel in your class, make sure you ask him. You know one of the things he's harvested, or something like that.
Megan:Maybe not right after lunch, though.
Jimmy:Probably a good idea.
Miguel:Probably not.
Miguel:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jimmy:And remember, team, if you ask one of us those stories, those questions you know, be conscious of you, know what we went through when we're in that moment and also make sure you're ready for that answer. Right, there's lots of layers to that. All right, until next time, peace, stay safe. We'll see you around.
