00:00For a few seconds, I thought like everything around me was on fire.
00:04I didn't realize like I was the one on fire.
00:17One evening when I was six years old, my dad asked me to go find my brothers.
00:23Ryan was 10 and Jason was 12.
00:28And when I found where they were, they had found a can of kerosene and they filled this dog bowl full of kerosene.
00:36Within a few seconds or so of me getting down there, they'd successfully lit the bowl on fire and it flashed over and it scared them.
00:45And so they kicked the bowl.
00:47When it flew, it flew towards me and the bowl actually hit me in the chest and it wrapped around me like a wet blanket with all the flaming kerosene.
00:57The neighbor had just come home from like camping or something like that.
01:01And he saw me running around on fire and he grabbed a sleeping bag out of the back of his car and he ran over to me and he tackled me with his sleeping bag, which that's what finally put the fire.
01:13There was an airport outside of town that happened to have had a care flight ready to go.
01:19That plane was able to fly me down to Las Vegas.
01:23That's where the main portion of my recovery came into play.
01:28And I was in the hospital for almost a solid year.
01:31My dad was my rock.
01:33He just had this way of being able to encourage me to do the things that I needed to do to be successful.
01:39When I was 17, I lost my dad to brain cancer.
01:42And that was a really rough entry into adulthood.
01:45Becoming a firefighter was really just a catalyst of me on the direction that I am now.
01:51I've been kind of working on a little program to try and help firefighters that work with burn survivors.
01:57So I kind of found a little bit of a niche on the outside of them to where I can still be kind of a part of that circle that sparked something in my brain that was like, you need to start sharing this on a much larger platform because much, much more so today we need it than ever.
02:15People are struggling out in the world.
02:17They really are.
02:18But over time, I've come to the conclusion that there are ways to work through those things and that life really is a beautiful thing if you can just see past the storm sometimes.
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