Posted on 08/26/2008 9:19:33 PM PDT by neverdem
Former Staff Sgt. Kevin Owsley is not quite sure what rattled his brain in 2004: the roadside bomb that exploded about a yard from his Humvee or the rocket-propelled grenade that flung him across a road as he walked to a Porta Potti on base six weeks later.
After each attack, he did what so many soldiers do in Iraq. He shrugged off his ailments — headaches, dizzy spells, persistent ringing in his ears and numbness in his right arm — chalking them up to fatigue or dehydration. Given that he never lost consciousness, he figured the discomfort would work itself out and kept it to himself.
“You keep doing your job with your injuries,” said Mr. Owsley, 47, an Indiana reservist who served as a gunner for a year outside Baghdad beginning in March 2004. “You don’t think about it.”
But more than three years after coming home, Mr. Owsley’s days have been irrevocably changed by the explosions. He struggles to unscramble his memory and thoughts. He often gets lost on the road, even with directions. He writes all his appointments down but still forgets a few. He wears a hearing aid, cannot bear sunlight on his eyes, still succumbs to nightmares and considers four hours of sleep a night a gift.
Mr. Owsley is part of a growing tide of combat veterans who come home from Iraq and Afghanistan with mild traumatic brain injuries, or concussions, caused by powerful explosions. As many as 300,000, or 20 percent, of combat veterans who regularly worked outside the wire, away from bases, have suffered at least one concussion, according to the latest Pentagon estimates. About half the soldiers get better within hours, days or several months and require little if any medical assistance. But tens of thousands of others have longer-term...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The head injury thing goes pretty far. We had best include children’s and adult sports, vehicle accidents, “minor” falls and a lot of other things. Not sure if even a MRI or CAT are going to show damage 100% of the time.
Unfortunately, the VA often “discovers” new diseases for us, in its unique mission of serving just vets.
I am not sure the STATE OF THE ART on these, but maybe some of the more serious can be somehow screened to see if they need CAT SCANS (such as loss of hearing, or numbness, and tell the soldiers that they must be truthful about any symptoms...
It's not concussions, and solders working wounded and coming home untreated. Anyone who was involved in a close encounter the author describes would be sent back to base medical and thoroughly examined, and would not be allowed to return to duty with symptoms like that.
These are problems he's complaining about since he got home after his tour.,br> It's a combination of many things- over exposure to all the noise, lack of sleep, poor eating habits, and stress. Even if you don't feel like you are stressed, it's there and builds up during the tour.
It always took me several months to unwind after you get home from a tour, and you don't get much rest when you first get home either. You have to learn how to go to sleep again. Until you do, you are absolutely drained, fatigued. You always get aches and pains as your body readjusts to civilian life. (Personally I like those aches and pains, much better than the aches and pains of army work)
When you are not sleeping well, or hardly at all, it's very hard on the memory. Your brain is exhausted. Some guys take much more than 3 months to recover and rejoin civilization (such as it is in the USA today, but as bad as it is, it's not near as bad as any war zone)
I wonder if this guy has went for consoling, or refused it. It's always available to guys having trouble turning back into civilized human beings.
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This is an important issue...Fortunately the VA does recognize PTSD as a medical disability now, in previous wars it was considered merely as combat fatigue or some other ailment...
With concussions, the veterans should report any concussion to their medical officers in the field as soon as they return to their field position or to base camp ..If they can, get a confirmation in writing and hold onto it as it could be an important document if they develop any type of cognitive disability..
The BIG problem will be with Medicare which does not recognize mental illness as a disease and will not cover Drs/specialists in that field and will not pay for prescription medicines for mental health- not even anti-anxiety medications..So suppose a veteran is unable to prove his disabled status to the VA years after an incident because of lack of a document or a witness...He can’t even turn to the VA...And it is doubtful whether Social Security Disability would cover him too...Our do nothing Congresses need to address this issue asap for eterans and civilians alike as it is a najor medical problem in this country..
The Universal Health Care they talk about—don’t count on it including mental health care..People are going to have to fight to have it included- if universal health care ever happens...
We have cat scans in the field hospitals. Nobody involved in close contact like that would be sent back to duty without a very complete check up and scans, x rays, blood work, etc. if they were displaying symptoms like that.
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