News From the Cause
The 312 The Most Important Injury of 2012: The Concussion (Chicago Tribune)
January 05, 2012
While reading up for my 12 Months, 12 Photos, 12 Stories series, I noticed a theme reoccuring in things I'd read or written about last year. Then, as I was brainstorming, I read this:
One of my good and dear friends is about to be discharged with 100% disability from the Army. At 32 years old, he can’t remember what day it is, and sometimes he can’t remember if he’s back here in the states, or in Germany, or in Afghanistan where he got hurt.
Traumatic Brain Injury is the signature wound of these current wars. Gerald, who is one of the smartest people I know, just chatted with me on Facebook and couldn’t remember that I was retired, or that one of the last official acts I carried out was pinning his Sergeant’s stripes on him. Because he couldn’t remember being a Sergeant, unless he sees the rank on his chest.His wife, Lisa tells me that he occasionally can’t remember her name. “I can see that he knows I’m important to him, but he struggles with that sometimes.”
That came immediately on the heels of John Keilman's heartbreaking piece about Anthony Wagner in the Tribune:
As a vital link between the Green Zone and Baghdad International Airport, Route Irish was the scene of frequent IED attacks and suicide bombings. Not long after he arrived, Wagner said, he was pulling guard duty in a tower overlooking the road when someone fired a rocket at him. It missed, but the noise of the detonation echoed in his skull for hours.
That was the first of five episodes in which Wagner said he was caught in the shock wave of an explosion. The most serious came when an IED went off near his armored vehicle. The blast pitched him around the troop compartment like a toy, and he felt the tremors through his entire body. That night, he suffered a splitting headache, disorientation and dizziness, almost as though he were drunk. Click here to view
