Marathon Fire Rescue
This pandemic hasn’t been a one-note slog over the past year. Isabella Sanchez, 26, reminds us what a long way we’ve come from those initial fear-filled weeks. “I remember the first call. Over the radio, it was ‘Protocol 36,’ the code we assigned for COVID-19,” Sanchez said, describing her visit to the home of an elderly woman struggling to breathe. Sanchez had an N95 mask for protection … and nothing else.
“There was fear on both sides. I remember thinking, ‘I’m just a human like you’ and it was hard because I was the one with the stretcher, the one used to helping,” she said. “The disease was so new back then and we hardly understood it.”
Sanchez is one of two female paramedic firefighters on the city squad and Chief John Johnson says he needs a dozen more like her. She’s a hard worker, curious and intelligent. She has an optimist’s smile that masks a core of steel, one that makes her run toward the fire rather than away and gives her the confidence to drive the “big rig” in reverse, at night, on narrow streets as was required on Fourth of July as her team searched for small brush fires to extinguish.
Like other women on the pandemic’s frontline, Sanchez struggled to protect herself, the other firefighters on her shift (“my brothers,” she calls them) and her family. “You don’t want to bring it to the station or bring it into your house,” she said of COVID-19.
This work, however, is Sanchez’s calling. “There are good days and some bad days, days of death and sadness,” she said. “But in the end, this is rewarding work and no one needs to thank us.”
Sanchez does have one special request. This brave woman, who found her calling years ago in junior lifeguard training on the West Coast, has someone she wants to thank in this space. “I love you, Mom,” she said.
