February 13, 2009
The "Crazy" Diagnosis
Last week, nearly forty years after his return from Vietnam, my husband was diagnosed with PTSD. He already has full disability benefits from the injuries he sustained when a 82 mm recoilless rifle round rocket landed in his fighting hole.
When he made it back stateside, the bus used to transport him to the hospital had chain linked fence on the windows to keep bricks from flying through, bricks from an angry American public. Why were we taking out our fury about this misguided war on the soldiers? Most of them were drafted. Not my husband though. He choose the Marines. He was looking for adventure in all the wrong places. He got adventure. He got a body full of shrapnel. A torn up leg, hip, shoulder and face. He got a lot of things.
He prided himself that he didn't have the crazy diagnosis. But those of us who lived with him throughout the years have known. We knew he drank himself senseless every night. We knew his anger issues. I am his fourth wife. Why so many wives, the psychiatrist asked him. Do you have anger issues?
We looked at each other. He has never hit anyone. He isn't violent. But he has a righteous rage that burbles up especially when his pain level raises. I have almost left him because I could no longer stand being yelled at every day for being who I am. But I didn't leave him because his anger is only a portion of who he is. His heart is so big and open that if he didn't have barbs all around it then he would be totally unprotected.
And his marriages did not end because of anger. They ended because of infidelity, his wife's first and then his. They ended because of a prolonged separation with number two and number three ended because of me.
He stopped his daily drinking routine in October and has finally gotten on a real pain management regimen. Now his anger has practically evaporated. Oh sure, it flares on occasion but not daily. I no longer feel under attack. We are making progress.
He got the diagnosis because I will get better benefits if I outlive him. Turns out his two purple hearts automatically qualify him for PTSD diagnosis. But believe me when I say he has PTSD. Loud noises can make him stop, drop and roll. Now that we are redecorating our house - I am not allowing the barricades he builds everywhere anymore. Everything relates back to Vietnam.
My husband, in his own lucky/unlucky paradigm of living, is lucky he has injuries that show. Because these injuries have allowed him to be an icon of that war. This man is the most genuine and authentic person I have ever met. There is no subterfuge about who he is. He is "the American War" in Vietnam embodied. The jungle is in him.
His life has followed the curves and bumps of our times. His story is important. And the stories of his mother (now dead), children, wives and others are important. Because they all show how war impacts EVERYONE.
March 14, 2009
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009 4:18PM
Crippled and Crazy or Maintenance Time at the VA
Thursday was time for CC to go to Dublin VA Hospital to see his primary care giver on the Blue Team. CC had taken a twenty year break from using the VA services, but about a year ago decided to give it another try. Dublin is about an hour from our home via I16. We left at sunrise, as soon as our granddaughter boarded the bus for school. At one point we got behind and then in front of and behind again of a van with Freedom is Not Free bumper sticker, a DV tag (disabled veteran) and a rather disagreeable man about sixty with at least forty buttons on his hat telling us exactly who he is. Only I can't read them because I am passing him at about seventy miles an hour. He has an ancient man riding with him.
We got there right as the fellow in the van unloaded a wheelchair at the main entrance and is lifting the much older vet into the seat. I let CC out at there too because we are 22 minutes late for the lab. I drive around, park in our usual spot (we have a date at the VA hospital in Dublin about twice a month). It's my pay day. I get to keep the travel cash and it's about all the salary I get these days. I sit in the car for a few minutes fiddling with my Iphone, checking email, Open Salon, Facebook, Huffington report.
Then I head down the narrow parking lot into a door sitting in the junction of two buildings. The hospital is a series of two story, long connected buildings. You pass through a range of about ten buildings per visit. I need an internal GPS device to navigate through these parts, but I don't have one. I blindly rely on CC while we are here. Sometimes he sends me on errands though. So I am having to slowly put together these mole-like tunnels in my mind to get from one place to another.
I made my way to the Blue Team's lab waiting room. There were too many people to sit next to CC so I take an empty spot a few seats away. Shortly thereafter, some loud man sits near me. He wants to talk about killing dogs or something equally repelling. I like to be a compassionate listener around there, but I wasn't in much mood for this fellow so I stuck myself further into the book I am reading and made more yellow marks on the page. We moved right on into the Blue Team waiting room after they took four tubes of blood from CC. An earthy, happy looking woman who was also a veteran was making fun with CC about how they were moving from one station to another. She seemed a lot more alive then the usual partner-in-waiting. She got called right away. We had a long wait.
CC got involved in a conversation with the man next to him. He tells CC how they gave him twelve pills instead of one hundred and twenty. CC tells him that a few years ago they fired everybody working here after a man laid out in the hall on gurney for over twenty four hours, finally dying. Now the service is much better. The geezer said his heart problems stemmed from Agent Orange. After about two hours of waiting the doctor was ready to see CC. I tagged on in. I opt out when it comes to lab work and needle pokes, but I usually go and listen to most of his doctors' visits. I heard once that it is good to have a witness cause some really crazy shit can go down in a doctor's office. Somebody might remember what was said if you have somebody with you.
CC sat near the door, Dr. Damn Meanie (a phonic spelling) sat at her desk and computer between CC and me. It was a little narrow room. She asked CC lots of questions and typed all the answers. She has a privacy screen on her computer and it looked black to me. The black screen raised my anxiety level a little. I mean she was typing about him, very intently and all I could see is a black screen. No glowing box. I even start thinking of writing a short story about journeling into a black computer that makes things happen in a parallel universe.
CC's cholesterol was down about 45 points from six months ago from diet alone. Dr. Damn Meanie was amazed. She had a paper on the table beside me with an article about opioids for non cancer pain. Damn, that is very much what CC's quest into the VA is all about - pain management on opoids. He even has a pain management doctor, Dr. Bad.
Two weeks ago when we were here for a teeth cleaning and a mental health consult; CC sent me to get his pain medication refilled from Dr. Bad. I traveled through the twisty turny long straight passages and found my way. I walked through the big swingy doors that had Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation written over them into the urniney smelling Corridor of Pain Management. I stuck my head into the secretary's office. She was about 60, really prim with a very smooth complexion and a less than modern hair do and outfit. "Dr. Bad is out today. No RX's. He's on emergency. Left yesterday. Won't be back tomorrow either." (Get the hell out of my office was what her quiet disproving demeanor was saying).
"You could go by Dr Damn Meanie's office and get her to write it." I took this news unhappily, CC was barely walking this week. His shoe connected to the leg brace had torn up and the tore up shoe bruised his foot. Since he doesn't have much feeling in the foot, he hadn't realized it until the foot hurt really, really badly. He was on crutches, but two days ago had not been able to walk at all. And he really did need more pain medicine. And when he's on crutches, that throws out his shoulder. His whole right side was blown the fuck up in Vietnam and he is damn near sixty and it had been a bad week. But I was nice to the lady. I promised we would go see Dr Damn Meanie.
When I told CC, he said that Dr. Bad had told him the nurse would fill his RX if he needed it. So we make our way back down to the Pain Clinic, through those cavernous doors into the hot and rarefied air back to see the Pain Secretary. She was resistant. CC was insistent. Both stayed pleasant. But CC mentioned a patient advocate and she decided she knew who she could call, but it would just depend on who answered the phone. Seems like she got it all straightened out and we would receive the RX in the mail in a few days. So she said. And it actually really happened. So on this trip, with CC up and about so much better then he had been previously - he wanted to go thank Ms Get 'er Done Pain Secretary. She was his new favorite person in the bowels of the VA hospital. But she wasn't there to receive his gratitude. Next we walked up to Mental Health. This is a new place to us. We have only been here once,when he saw a psychiatrist and she said he could have a PTSD diagnosis and she made him an appointment with her for a month later. But nobody seemed to have known a thing about the appointment a month later. CC started wondering if he was crazy.
On this fine day, we journeyed to where ever in the hell they hide the Mental Health Clinic to see about when he would ever have another appointment. The Clinic had been changed around since we were last there. Now it was crowded all together, the space abbreviated.
As CC negotiated a new appointment, I noticed a big wide wheelchair full of shoes. Shoes? Then I saw this little bitty old black man come to it and pull two big bottles of pills out of something under the shoes. I am interested. He trotted on back to the back from whence he had come and left the wheelchair behind. I began imagining he was a homeless dude with an over-attachment to shoes that he wheels around with him everywhere he goes. CC said he probably has a foot problem and had to bring all of his shoes for the check up.
As we were leaving Mental Health, a fellow in his early twenties was wheeled by. He didn't have on a shirt, Angry looking, he was blondewith a plethora of tattoos. Across his shoulders widely spaced scrolley letters proclaimed USMC.
CC got his travel money and then one last errand. Find the Prosthesis wing of this place and get another one of those soft knee braces he wears every day. We went in there. I had a phone call and decided to step outside to take it. CC pointed twenty feet away from the door I exited and said, "there is the car, just wait there for me!" And damn if the car wasn't right there across from us.
CC made it out to the car about twenty minutes later. We had been here for four hours. Driving off we spotted the blue van with the Freedom is Not Free sticker leaving as well.
July 11, 2009
Living in Combat Mode
Dealing with CC hurts because if I let myself be in the least bit vulnerable; I get torn to shreds. When he gets in PTSD mode, no information is transferred or accepted nicely.
Being aid, assistant and wife for a combat wounded Veteran Marine who has a brittle forty year old case of PTSD is not for sissies. The shrapnel he carries inside his body is also in the vortex of energy swirling around him. Get near him at your own expense.
Over the years, I've turned reactive, like his mother. If I could choose a person I most don't want to be like; it would be her. I perceived her as a self centered and mean spirited woman with few social skills.
She was born in 1931 in Rhode Island to French Canadians (try imagining this accent - one of the less lovely ones on the planet). I met her when she was 61 and she was already set in her ways, quarrelsome, gnarled and permanently angry with her husband.
Everyday since I married CC, I've slowly inched into becoming just like her. She is my shadow self, beckoning me towards madness. Her own creativity was bled drop by drop, eventually distilling into rage, despair, depression, low self esteem and dementia.
When she died; I found out she was much more than this. She was a chronicler. Kinda, sorta, a lot like - me. And when she died, she left me the grandest of all gifts. She left me a story. I now believe she is a minor saint in the pantheons of Goddesses.
In this story she left me to write; I am able to take some her circumstances to vent my own rage and despair after experiencing a particularly bad combat atmosphere in my home. I retreat into my office and slip into "Clara," my alter ego, a woman trapped early in life at a convent and forced to be a conformist. Someone married to her faith as well as to a male chauvinist.
The funny thing is Clara transforms me and I transform her. She gives me a way to vent my despair when my husband is having a bad day (which means all around him are also having one). She gives me a way to transcend the pain of living with someone mentally and physically disabled. Clara is filled with her Catholic faith and is constantly finding comfort through prayer in this story. My transcendence beyond writing is found by lying on the earth and letting her soak up my grief and pain. Whether it is Clara praying her rosary or me in the full embrace of Gaia, each of us eventually get up, ready to move forward without quitting.
It was CC's mom's Catholic duty to serve her abusive husband. By the end of her life she had become his jail keeper, just plain mean to him as he lay in bed unable to move anything but his right hand.
I always liked CC's daddy. He was affable, a flirt, outrageous. He could tell a good story, and I wrote many of them down. He was responsible and took care of his wife and family. By his death he was physically repulsive, but he never lost the glint in his eyes or the catching smile. Yet in my story of Clara, he is almost always the antagonist.
It is my patriotic duty and privilege to care for my old warrior. I do not wish to one day be his prison guard, resentfully and meanly giving him care. CC is not evil and his verbal terrorism has always only been a small part of the whole package. But I am sure this part of him has been with him since the war. I am, after all, his fourth wife. This right there will tell you; he is not easy to live with. But if any of you have ever been married to a soldier (CC is a Marine - think soldier to the power of infinity); you know these men make you their country. In his company, I am perpetually safe, prepared and guarded. No one can penetrate our perimeters. He knows how to love someone from the deepest recesses of his heart. Besides that, CC is smart about spending less then he makes, paying bills and living within our means. He makes it all worthwhile.
This man has loved me and been here with me through some horrific and good times. He has been step-dad to my two sons since they were eleven and six and we've been raising our eleven year old granddaughter together since her birth.
Who am I to leave and run when I married him for better or worse?
I believe it is my duty, my right, my karma even, to be with this man; helping him balance his brittle emotional state, this sickness: a soldier's heart. His PTSD is like another country, a battle-torn one where the war has never been won.
Some days CC feels like a rogue dictator hijacking any semblance of peace in our home with his physical pain and emotional torment.
Somebody has to take care of all these people coming home from war. I am a volunteer, just like today's soldiers in our all volunteer army. I will be there for him; though there are times I feel like the recoilless rifle round that crippled his right side just shattered my very heart.
November 29, 2009
Touch This and Make a Wish
CC's been sitting outside of WalMart in Forsyth, going on his third day. He and other Marine Corps League friends are collecting toys and money for the the Annual Toys for Tots program. All the toys and money being given at this location are distributed within this county.
These veterans, stoically standing (or in CC's instance, sitting) are touchstones for shoppers passing through the doors. Typical America, with all its vainglorious and loud living, rarely gives people the opportunity to tell how their lives have been touched by themselves or loved ones serving in the US Armed Services.
These sentinel veterans are like wishing wells, with contributors throwing toys, dollars and stories as prayers and wishes for those who serve and children with needs.
As CC left for his last day, he told me these three stories.
"A young man stopped when he saw my purple heart and thanked me for my service. He'd served three tours in Iraq. He was young, in his twenties, but his eyes were old."
"Another lady stopped and told me she had two brothers and a cousin who had gone to Vietnam. Now, she has a grandson in Iraq. She thanked me for my service."
One lady showed me a picture of her grandson who has had cancer. "Last year, he got some of these toys we collected and it had made his Christmas. Now he is doing better."
December 12, 2009
Not Just A Spectator
At six this Saturday morning; I was not real hip in getting up and going anywhere. It was wet and cold and I was still sleepy. I had photos to take and that in itself was probably the most motivating factor propelling me.
I got to be part of the "Great Buy". I told you here about CC collecting toys and money at WalMart for Toys for Tots. This morning we went to spend all those dollars dropped in the jar Thanksgiving weekend.
We went to the Big Lots Store in Macon to do all our buying before they opened at 9am. It was like what you see on TV. We had every cart at our disposal and rushed around getting whatever struck our fancy. CC choose to use his weekend's walking quota for this event.
Last year and years before, all the gifts given to families for the most part contained toys for younger children. Our mission was to collect items interesting to older kids.
CC, Ron and, Bitsy and myself were designated buyers. Bitsy had the Bibb County money for children in that county and we had $1600 for Monroe County to buy whatever we wanted with an extra 20% off.
This is a partial list of items I remember putting in the multiple buggies we were filling:
microscopes,chess, checkers, yatctse, huge artist sets, photo albums, soft blankets and “husbands”, exercise mats, baseballs, watches, clocks, radios, markers and pens and dry erase boards
We filled many baskets. The three women working at Big Lots took our carefully bundled stacks of cash and counted them. Cars began congregating outside as stressed and worried shoppers watched us plunder all the good things.
Leaving, Ron said, Can we eat, yet?" and it was off to the Cracker Barrel for eggs and biscuits. Conversation eventually turned to the VA - as Ron has had over 20 surgeries on his eye from a retina suddenly detaching a couple of years ago. "Agent orange," he muses, "or blasts from aircraft repeatedly emitting missiles near my proximity."
This gets us thinking about compensation, how do you quantify a terrifying and brutal experience of war into the money that helps you survive into old age? How do you prove the culpability of war in your injuries to your body and psyche? How much money do you deserve as your body and mind deteriorate years later in ways that are directly connected to this combat?
Ron and CC are in the process of going through records which are not easily attained. Going to our congressmen and getting paperwork such as the date any man in your company was killed. You figure out which of these pertain to where you were and what was happening to you on one of those brutal days of killing which you experienced forty years ago and present this as evidence of your injuries and subsequent disabilities.
Just yesterday my husband told me the stupidest thing he ever did in Vietnam. He took his boots off one night before he laid down to sleep for awhile. This of all nights was the night the NVA (North Vietnamese Army ) overran his company perimeter lines over to the right of his squad's position. They got past the L P (listening post) and past a machine gun fighting hole and threw a grenade into the machine gun hootch, killing and injuring them - and then they were there, inside the Charlie Company perimeter in the dead of night where two out of three men were asleep.
Eventually the N V A were beat back outside the perimeter and were mortared in prearranged grids until there was a scattering of dead or dying N V A around the outside of the perimeter and quite a few within it.
At day break CC and his squad had to check the bodies, make sure they were dead. Later he had to throw dead and naked N V A on to a pile of bodies in a bomb crater.
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How much to you pay a man or woman to experience this? We are having to prove PTSD at a time we are doing our best to keep it at bay. A woman asked me the other day, isn't he better after all this time?
The answer is no, he is not. It gets worse as his body grows older and his hips no longer carry his weight and severe pain has become his most familiar companion. Back in the day, his anger did not have to be controlled with seizure medicine so those of us who love him could be near him. But the veneer has worn thin. Suggestions to skip a pain pill when seeing the psychiatrist, so she will understand his condition are met with looks of skepticism by me. How I am to escort him if he is not compliant with treatment? I am human. My feelings get hurt, I get mad - because if he gets started, he will stay at his targets until they are inflamed with his same fire. He has to comply, compensation be damned.
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Breakfast over, we climb back in our vehicles and proceed to the Firehouse in Forsyth. Over in one area there already stacked are toys for eligible families. Sure enough, they all look like perfect gifts for children under eight. We bring in our white bags, but we don't take the toys from them. Others in this chain of charity will unsack the packages, get the lists of families, divide the toys accordingly and deliver to families when the time comes. Firemen, Veterans and their wives. An orchestrated event taking place Christmas after Christmas. This year I helped. I may have gotten it - the good feeling which comes at Christmas.
