I went to surprise my firefighter husband, Tyler, at the station for his birthday, carrying balloons and a cake from his favorite bakery. But the crew fell silent when I walked in. Captain Reyes looked at me and asked, \u201cYou don\u2019t know yet?\u201d<\/p>\n
Tyler had been injured in a warehouse fire and taken to the hospital. No one had reached me because his emergency contact form still listed my old phone number. I left the cake behind and rushed to find him.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
He was awake, but he had a fractured shoulder, cracked ribs, and a concussion. After I\u2019d had a moment to hold his hand and breathe, Tyler told me what had happened: he\u2019d gone back into the unstable building to rescue a little girl. She was safe, and the department had approved a Medal of Valor for him.<\/p>\n
The next morning, Captain Reyes and the crew brought the birthday cake and balloons to Tyler\u2019s hospital room. This time, everyone was smiling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to surprise my firefighter husband, Tyler, at the station for his birthday, carrying balloons and a cake from his favorite bakery. But the […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21610,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21611,"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21609\/revisions\/21611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepatswalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}