Some details in this essay have been changed or removed to protect the identities of those involved.

It’s an odd feeling the first time your hands stop working. It was 4:30 a.m. on a cold February morning. Lights darting in every direction, siren haphazardly howling off the buildings, as my fire engine tore deep into the tranquility of the early morning hours as we raced to another house fire.

Though relatively new to the job, I was working in one of the busiest fire battalions in the country, and house fires were part of our routine. So it was a fairly ordinary event on this pre-dawn morning as I wiped the sleep from my eyes and secured my gear. Then the radio came alive: “Engine 15 to Fire Alarm! We’re on the scene of a two-story brick residence. Heavy fire showing and we have a confirmed child trapped on the second floor!”

While we were en route, the first fire truck had arrived and was setting the stage for the units close behind. As the first at the fire, it would be their job to deploy their hoses and dive headlong into the heaviest smoke in an attempt to find and extinguish the fire. As the second-arriving company it would be our job to enter the building and search for the child.

Photo: Craig Rose, San Jose (CA) Fire Department photographer. Used with permission.

Tools in hand, my captain and I were off the truck before it came to a complete stop, running to the front of the house. Heavy, choking black smoke poured from the doors and windows as we stopped in the front yard to put on the masks that would give us the air to search for a victim inside. Just before I pulled my mask over my head, a flowing figure in a nightgown plowed into my right shoulder. As I instinctively raised my hand to steady against this surprise attack, I found myself catching a middle-aged woman as she started to fall. My face inches from hers, I saw a cocktail in her eyes like nothing I had ever seen before: a mix of terror and pleading with an intensity I’ve yet to find a way to quantify. “My baby! Please! My baby is right there!” she screamed, pointing to a front bedroom on the second floor. “Jesus Christ, go get my baby!” she begged as she stared through me, her balled fists landing haphazardly against my chest. As she started to collapse, her hands tore at my gear; grabbing the straps of my air tank, then the orange flashlight hanging from a carabiner. As suddenly as she appeared, she was gone. A police officer ran over, bear hugged the woman and whisked her away from the front of the building. Our time together lasted less than 10 seconds. Yet as I steadied myself and pulled the air mask down over my head, I found my hands could not grasp the straps to secure it to my face. An act I had done thousands of times — in the dark, laying down, in training, on scene under stress — and with the same type of muscle memory I used to turn on a light or tie my shoes, I simply couldn’t do it. In a literal life and death situation, my hands stopped working. What I recognized that morning was that for a moment, I fell victim to a well documented stress sensation called “secondary arousal.” Primary & Secondary Arousal and the Operator Regardless of discipline, primary and secondary arousal is critical to effective operations that have the potential to be dangerous, demanding and/or time-sensitive. An important aspect in the “Fight, Flight, or Freeze” decision options, operator arousal to an event or an environment is key in harnessing the strength and courage to execute actions like operating the ram on a no-knock search warrant or crawling into a building on fire.

Primary arousal, the one we feel most often, is a result of the performance demands of the mission. It produces increased readiness and heightens alertness. It is a skill that most in dangerous professions know and have harnessed after a few months of training. In my case, the primary arousal came at the time of the initial dispatch and the drive to the scene: an alert but controlled understanding that we were going to do something dangerous and that we should get focused.

Secondary arousal results from interaction that is not directly related to mission outcome. As Asken et al. point out in their book Warrior Mindset (2010), “The problem with secondary arousal is that it is not skill focused. Its occurrence and intensity are unpredictable, it’s harder to control, and it tends to inhibit effective action in operations.” In my case, the interaction with the child’s mother, however brief, was an unexpected source of secondary arousal. While this wasn’t my first fire with people trapped, it was the first time that I had a deeply personal connection with someone on the scene prior to doing my work and it caused an experience for which I was not prepared.

Falling victim to the mental impact of secondary arousal, even momentarily, caused a physical reaction in my biology. The outside mental stress of seeing a victim’s mother prior to entering the building spiked my adrenaline, norepinephrine and cortisol hormones. Despite the minimum skill required in securing my mask, the rush of chemicals impacted my motor skills making the task momentarily impossible.

While Asken is more nuanced in his break down, the encompassing theory is that some arousal (primary) is necessary and can enhance task execution; too much arousal (aka an adrenalin dump) can be detrimental to performance causing a deterioration in fine and/or complex motor skills.

The reality is that there is a wide variance in how secondary arousal affects the emergency operator. For some, vision narrows. For others, it is a memory distortion or the effect of time slowing down around them. There is also wide latitude in how best to manage and overcome the impact secondary stressors. Asken recommends a variety of methods, including self-talk, goal setting and imagery simulation. In my case, I relied on a breath control technique that within 10–12 seconds (seemingly an eternity on a fire ground) returned my heart rate to an elevated, but operational, cadence. More importantly, it returned feeling to my fingers, allowing me to secure my mask and make entry into the building.

Ultimately, thanks to a skilled fire attack by the first-in company and the experience of my captain guiding our search, we made it to the bedroom to which the mother had pointed. We located her unconscious child, and carried the child out to waiting paramedics. Despite a significant stay in the hospital for respiratory injuries from the toxic smoke, the victim eventually made a full recovery.

As an operator (law enforcement, fire, EMS, corrections, military) a basic understanding of stress is critical to predicting operational cadence. While many consider “stress” to be a nebulous mental state occurring in the mind, this definition does not do it full justice. Stress has very real physical manifestations in the responders’ physical biology. It can affect the way members communicate, the way they come up on target with a firearm, or run a saw on the roof of a building fire.

Knowing one’s personal reaction to primary and secondary arousals — and how to properly manage them — is a key component in mission success. In the same way that we encourage our responders to train their bodies for the physical realities of their work, we should also provide our members with the tools to harness and manage acute scene stresses.