SPONSORED SPECIAL SECTION FIRST RESPONDERS RESILIENCY
Susan Farren, center, and her ‘incredible’ team of first responder instructors, staff and volunteers are on a mission of culture-changing resilience.
The girl who lived Susan Farren is supposed to be dead. The Sonoma Valley native had spent her decades-long career in emergency services—first an EMT, then paramedic and later a trainer and supervisor—working throughout the Bay Area, raising five kids with her firefighter husband of 23 years. After a long, hard-worked career she’d retire and settle into an easier life—that was the idea, circa 2015, at least. But as emergency personnel know better than most, the best-laid plans oft go awry. Despite hopes that she’d graduate from her career “unscathed,” as she puts it, Farren wasn’t immune to the purgatories often faced by first responders. First came an “unwanted” divorce. That devastating dissolution led to her losing healthcare coverage—which, in turn, necessitated a return to work. With the end of her marriage forcing her out of retirement in 2016, Farren had been at a new job in Oakland for less than five months when, as she puts it bluntly, “I began to urinate blood.” Twenty-four hours and multiple oncology body scans later, Farren’s doctors delivered grave news: They found a tumor on her right kidney, and a mass on her liver they believed had metastasized from her chest. They said she had a year to live. She was 51, with five kids between ages 12 and 19 and a divorce just finalized. Her medical team began arranging her placement to hospice care. And that’s where Farren’s story begins. Because, as Farren likes to remind people taken aback by her run of bad fate a decade ago: “Don’t worry—I didn’t die.” A follow up scan would be her “stay of execution,” as she calls it. The mass on her liver was revealed to be a hemangioma—a birthmark. Cancer had not spread; the tumor was isolated to her kidney and could be removed surgically. She could take her list of palliative services off speed dial. A full recovery was expected. And it was in the days following surgery to remove the kidney tumor that Farren heard the cast-off comment from a physician that would redirect her life. “We see a lot of this in first responders,” a doctor said. “See a lot of what?” she responded. “Organ cancers.”
Born under punches When Farren returned home to recuperate from her cancer surgery, she was still haunted by what the physician had said. “And the first thing I did was google: organ cancer first responders,” she says. She immediately found articles in medical journals focused on the correlation between first responders and organ cancer, specifically around the constant accumulation of adrenaline and cortisol, a primary “stress hormone,” in their systems. Her research led beyond organ cancer to other maladies plaguing first responders—strokes, heart attacks, divorce, addiction, suicide. She came to a sobering realization: “The work we did was actually killing us.” The numbers don’t lie. First responders are statistically more likely than the general population to develop a litany of diseases—skin cancer, mesothelioma, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, kidney cancer and Lou Gehrig’s disease among them. Female firefighters are observed to develop breast cancer at six times the rate of the rest of the female population. Firefighters overall are at a 1.21 times greater risk of colon cancer; a 1.58 times increased risk of mesothelioma (a cancer in the lining of internal organs, usually caused by asbestos exposure); and at 1.53 times greater risk of multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. The risks are cumulative, increasing the longer one stays on the job. And while occupational exposure to toxic chemicals and other substances play their part—especially in the fire service—lifestyle factors among first responders are major contributors to negative health outcomes. Substance abuse, sleep irregularity, divorce, depression and anxiety top the list of issues leading emergency personnel to chronic disease. Equally alarming: Recent studies describe the suicide rate among first responders as “the silent crisis,” far exceeding rates in the general population, with police and firefighters more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. In 2024 alone, 133 first responders died by suicide in the U.S., according to research from the Firefighters Behavioral Health Alliance—and it is estimated around 40% of cases go unreported, meaning the actual numbers are significantly higher. Over this past Thanksgiving weekend, a Berkeley fire captain hanged himself, three
December 2025
NorthBaybiz 53
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