This is my own experience. These are my beliefs and my opinions. I’m not speaking on behalf of the military or the chain of command. I’m not representing anybody’s opinions or beliefs but my own.
I’m currently awaiting a medical discharge from the army for injuries sustained in Iraq and after I came home. I don’t have any glorious war story, no Purple Heart for my injuries, and I think that’s the reason it’s been so difficult for me to get treatment. I was in a vehicle accident in Iraq. It wasn’t anything hostile. It was just a driver not paying attention. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt. We didn’t have functional seat belts. We didn’t have a functional lock on the door either.
So when we were hit I was ejected from the vehicle. I sustained a back and a neck injury. I hit my head pretty hard. Fortunately, I was wearing a helmet. My adrenalin level was pumping, so I wasn’t in a whole lot of pain at the time, and I was able to just continue mission. “Charlie Mike,” as they say.
So I kept at it, but I started having problems, chronic back and neck pain. After coming home from Iraq I sustained another injury. It was just a football injury during unit physical training, nothing spectacular there. I had dislocated my shoulder and had torn cartilage in it, but I was only given a quick X-ray and some Motrin. Those of you in the military know how much they like to give out Motrin.
I started working in the neuroscience ward at Walter Reed, treating a lot of patients with traumatic brain injuries. I’d been back from Iraq for almost a year, but I was still trying to get treatment for my back and neck injuries. I had recurrent dislocations throughout that time. I started having memory loss, headaches, and dizziness. That’s when I started recognizing that I was having a lot of the symptoms of mild TBI, but I couldn’t get a screening for it. There really was no screening process for it then and in large part there still isn’t.
Fast forward. Over the last year, I’ve been stationed at Fort Drum. When I got there I was given orders to deploy. By that time I’d become fed up with not being able to get treatment for my injuries. I wasn’t capable of doing my job. One of my biggest concerns was that if I couldn’t do my job, other people might die.
I addressed those concerns to the medical screening team. Over two years after the injury, they finally looked at my shoulder injury and agreed I wasn’t fit for deployment. I gave them my MRI results and they said, “You should have had surgery a long time ago.”
They did the operation, and then I went through six months of physical therapy. After that, they told me I had plateaued. I’d gotten all of the good out of the physical therapy that I was going to get, but my shoulder is in worse shape than it was prior to the surgery. Because they waited so long, my shoulder is disabled for the rest of my life.
I was supposed to be medically discharged but nothing happened for almost six months. I was waiting for appointments for both psychiatric and physical issues. I asked questions but didn’t get answers.
I know my problems aren’t the only ones. My problems are minor compared to the stories of other soldiers for whom I’ve provided peer counseling. This is a systemic issue, and it’s not any one doctor’s or any one commander’s fault.
The only recourse that I was able to find was speaking to the media. Two days after I spoke with the media I saw a traumatic brain injury specialist. A physical therapist rescreened my shoulder, diagnosing more problems. After six months with almost no progress, I got proper care two days after my story was published in the New York Times.
We all know how many problems there are with VA health care, but military health care doesn’t get much attention. Soldiers are afraid to speak out. It’s time soldiers become proactive and demand proper health care. We enlisted. We stepped up to serve our country and we haven’t asked for a whole lot in return. Proper health care should be, at a bare minimum, what we’re entitled to. The fact that we’re not getting it makes me sick, because I have seen too many of my brothers and sisters suffering, and we are tired of suffering. We need to demand that we be taken care of.