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Village SDA Church

"Why I Am Here" Podcast

Michael Kusarawana

Jason Russell

From Prescription Drug Addiction to Freedom

Our desire is to share with you the transformed lives of our guests.

Our hope is that these experiences will inspire you to have a closer walk with God.

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There was a time when I would wake up, brush my teeth, look up and see the guy in the mirror, and I hated him.

If he was dead, everything would be fine.

And that was, looking back now, I believe that my wife and my children and God are the only people that kept me alive.

I am Michael Ksarona, and you are listening to Why I Am Here, a show that shares the incredible stories of our guests and how they can inspire you to have a closer walk with God.

On today's show, I sit down with Jason Russell.

Jason was addicted to pain medication, which led him to stealing this medication on the ambulances that he worked as a paramedic.

Whilst he was in jail, he found God by reading his Bible.

After he served his term, he went back to be employed as a paramedic, let alone to get his position as a supervisor.

And God can do the same thing in your life.

I was born and raised in Berrien Springs.

As a child I was brought up, we came to church every week.

As I got older, joined the Pathfinder Club, which is a youth group.

Went to our local Adventist school that was affiliated with the church.

Graduated from there, started in the academy.

I think that may have been part of where I kind of started to lose focus.

As I got into my more teenage years, I started to kind of steer away from the church, sort of that rebellion phase.

It didn't seem as important to me because the circle that I kept, the friends that I kept, not that they're bad people, but it just wasn't the Christ-centered focus that I had been born with or raised with.

When I joined the fire department, 1 of the things that I found very interesting was I wanted to be an EMT, emergency medical technician, And that sort of experience, that fascinated me.

So I took an EMT class and kind of got started down that path.

I was hired by 1 of our local ambulance services and started off in a wheelchair division, which is kind of like non-emergency transport.

At that time, they didn't hire EMTs full-time to run ambulance calls.

That changed a few years later, and they started hiring EMTs.

Did you have this vision of being an EMT when you were growing up, or is something that came later in life?

I really didn't, that came later in life.

Growing up I wanted to be, of all things, an aircraft mechanic.

That was kind of what I enjoyed and what I wanted to do.

I can't tell you why, but my brother, when He got me into the fire department and I kind of followed in his footsteps.

He's all about the fire and emergency services.

And I kind of looked up to him at that time and I wanted to do that.

So it's your brother who gave you this inspiration to go this other route?

Yeah, that was, I just kind of, everything he did seemed very cool.

It was it was fascinating You know the lights and the sirens and the you know, the high intensity that was that was something that incinated me So We were actually on the fire department together, and he is the 1 who got me hired into the ambulance service, kind of got my name in the door and got me interviews and things like that.

So now you're in the fire department, and I guess you were enjoying it by this time and was it all you expected?

The fire, the excitement, you know when you're growing up you don't kind of have the actual picture of work, you're just thinking oh when I grow up or when I get a chance I want to do this in life.

Was it as exciting as you you saw it in your brother when you actually working at the fire?

It was it was the fire department is very interesting.

I mean, it's it's, it's a great group of people.

It's a family and the the camaraderie that you see and the excitement and the experiences that you have with each other, you tend to just grow extremely close to each other because that's not something that everybody understands.

Much like in emergency services, with being a medic and things like that, there are experiences that you'll go through with families that the general population just doesn't understand because they've not seen it.

Now you're on this job and what happens next?

So I was, I started off as I mentioned in their wheelchair division, worked my way up to road personnel.

Fast forward a few years, I actually became a dispatch supervisor where I worked, you know, monitoring people, doing assignments and schedules and things of that nature.

But eventually that transitioned to an opportunity to be a supervisor on the street after I got my medic license.

I did that, I had a crew of 12 folks, and that was probably my favorite job.

There's a lot of stress with that that comes with it there, but there is you really build relationships and you build friendships with the people that you're working with because Again of the experiences that you share together and seeing each other all the time Typically our shifts are 24 hours.

So you're away from home and this kind of becomes a second family to you.

These are the people that you see and you're with constantly.

And you build that relationship, that camaraderie, working together.

1 of the biggest stressors is purely just the hours.

You know, the 24 hours again away from home while it has its good aspects, the negative of that it can be very taking on your family life, especially if you have small children.

It's hard for them to understand when you're not home.

You know, it's, you don't have that 8 to 5, you know, you get up, you take the kids to school, you pick them up, you bring them home.

And there's, There's those days where you're just so busy that you don't even have a chance maybe to call home just to check in and say, Hey, I love you guys.

Is it that busy that you cannot even take a call?

Paramedics can, I mean, at those services, much like police, there's just those days where things are so busy, there's so many requests for service, you just don't have an opportunity maybe to even grab a bite to eat or to sit down and take a moment to catch your breath?

And it's 1 after the other and it can take a toll.

It's sometimes stressful, but you are building these relationships with your co-workers.

So basically, I kind of let stress get the better of me.

To get to where kind of this story begins is there are certain things that really, really get to you.

And they, you know, they just, they keep you awake at night and how you deal with that, there are constructive ways and there are not constructive ways.

Thomas Wilson

Saved from Amputation

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I started out slowly, I started out deliberately, and every time I said Jesus son of David have mercy on me, the emotions just grew, and I just could not stop saying, and I must have said it, I think, at least a hundred times, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.

I am Michael Kusarawona and you are listening to Why I Am Here, a show that shares the incredible stories of our guests and how they can inspire you to have a closer walk with God.

Tom Wilson is a retired surgeon, but something tragic happened whilst he was working on his tractor in his field.

He got into an accident that led to breaking his leg.

Not only that, the doctors suggested that if this leg was not going to be getting better, it needed to be amputated.

Wilson cried to God, Son of David, have mercy on me.

Went to osteopathic medical school, became a surgeon, practiced general and urologic surgery.

And in 2001, at my mid-60s, I retired from surgery and moved back from the Detroit area to where both my wife and I were raised here in Berrien Springs.

That was a big decision in and of itself, but I had inherited 24 acre piece of land from my parents in their estate.

And the meaning of that 24 acres was it was the original farm which my dad farmed as a fruit farmer.

Grew up on that farm and from that original little 24 acres My dad branched out, leased other properties, and at the time of the 50s and 60s, he was regarded as 1 of the larger fruit farmers in the area.

Oh, we started out usually with strawberries, sometimes asparagus, sometimes cucumbers.

But we went from strawberries into the various fruits.

Usually about raspberries would come and raspberries would take us into cherries and cherries and take us into the grapes, the pears, the apples, the plums.

Wow, that's quite a wide range of fruits.

So when you when you moved, what was the condition of the farm, especially the cherry orchard?

When we talked about the estate, he was trying to get his estate in place before his death, which he did.

We had partnered on putting a cherry orchard on this 24 acres.

And when I took over in 01, it was at the end of its producing power, the trees were breaking down.

The method of harvesting with the shakers shortened the life of a tree.

So it was getting pretty well decayed and in fact in 2004 after my accident we took the whole orchard out.

So whilst the cherry orchard was decaying and you were taking care of it, what happened?

We were still producing, it was still producing some, and there's always upkeep.

The weeds were growing, so I had let the weeds get a little ahead of me.

So We have what we call a bush hog that we put on the back of an orchard tractor.

I was cleaning up the orchard, I forget which day of the week it was, trying to cut the weeds down just to keep the land and the orchard in working condition.

So you are using the bush hawk by yourself?

Yes and that's on the back of a tractor hooked up to a power takeoff and you try to run your RPMs at a fast enough and high enough pace to have these large blades cut down weeds and things like that.

So this is something that you grew up doing so you know actually what you're doing and you enjoy this kind of stuff.

Yes It was kind of a time of where you'd be on the tractor and you could just be reflecting on other things But also being outdoors and taking care getting work done taking care of the land.

All right So at this particular day, it's it was an unusual day Something happened.

I was trying to get the orchard prepared.

We had company coming and I just wanted the place to look nice.

Now my home is about a tenth of a mile from the road.

I was working in the orchard and my mailbox is down on the main road that approaches my house.

And I was down at the mailbox when I ran over a branch under the weeds that I hadn't seen, when all of a sudden, I still don't know how and where it came from, but something hit my left foot, twisted it, and fractured my ankle.

I had a difficult time of accepting the fact that did I really break my ankle.

I looked down my foot seemed to be in the right place and I said to myself I broke my leg.

I felt something happened I heard kind of a pop and then when I looked down I thought well everything looks alright but did I really break my leg?

For some reason, I knew I had broken my leg.

So I took my hands, put them under my knee, picked my foot up, or picked my leg up with my hands.

And when my above the ankle boot, that's what I was wearing, when I picked my leg up my boot just swung loosely back and forth showing that that foot was just hanging on by what looked like to be tendons.

I mean I would imagine that's what it looked like.

But with my boot on it was holding everything in place.

So when you saw that, what was your reaction?

Well I said, prior to lifting, I said, no, I couldn't have broke my leg.

When I picked it up, and my boot started swinging by itself, separate from the leg.

I looked around to see what would have done it, and off to my left, but too far away that I could see, I saw another branch sticking up out of the weeds with a fork.

It had a main stem with 2 branches coming off And I thought, well, maybe that some way caught me and broke my leg.

But I still don't have a real clear view of what happened to cause my leg to be broken.

So now you realize that your leg has been broken and you're out there on the bush hook by yourself.

So how did you get out of this situation?

Well, I reached down and took the power takeoff, disengaged the power takeoff and then managed with using the throttle and a little grinding of the gears, I got the tractor in gear, drove it up to the lawn and parked it on away from the driveway so I wouldn't block the driveway of getting back out.

No, the throttle on these tractors were hand throttles.

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"Why I Am Here" Podcast

From Prescription Drug Addiction to Freedom

Transcript

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