Captain James Owen is a retired Long Beach Fire Department Captain, author of The Last Patient: A Memoir of Resilience and Recovery, speaker, recovery advocate, and founder of Camp Pivot, a platform dedicated to helping first responders, veterans, high-stress professionals, and their families confront trauma, rebuild trust, and recover with discipline.
James spent nearly three decades in emergency response and public safety, including more than two decades with the Long Beach Fire Department. His career included service as a firefighter, paramedic, fire captain, incident commander, peer support member, and responder to all-risk incidents across one of Southern California’s busiest urban environments. His background spans paramedicine, fireground command, wildland response, hazardous materials, urban search and rescue, maritime operations, and leadership inside high-pressure public safety systems.
But James’s work today is not built on rank alone. It is built on cost.
For years, he ran toward other people’s emergencies while quietly carrying his own. Childhood instability, cumulative trauma, death, divorce, addiction, organizational betrayal, physical injury, and the slow erosion of identity all became part of the story he would eventually have to face. Like many first responders, James learned how to function under pressure long before he learned how to process what pressure was doing to him. The job rewarded control, performance, humor, and silence. Eventually, silence became too expensive.
That reckoning became The Last Patient.
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Interview Transcript: Click Here