A Soldier's Tragedy: Ironically Bringing Much-Needed Awareness to all Americans Suffering from TBI

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A Soldier's Tragedy: Ironically Bringing Much-Needed Awareness to all Americans Suffering from Traumatic Brain Injury
Patricia DeGennaro
Posted November 26, 2007 | 03:58 PM (EST)

Tragically, it has come to light that over 20,000 of our young soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injury or TBI. Some cases are quite severe, while others show only minor symptoms.

Often there are clear indicators that are misunderstood. Victims sometimes cry or become angry for no reason, suffer major depression or sleep through most of the day. Anything from your eyesight to your memory can be permanently affected. You may not remember your mom visiting yesterday or what you said to your child minutes ago.

All or many of these symptoms could be mistaken for physiological stress, but cannot be cured with common medication because there has been direct injury to the brain not the psyche. Further, it can take several years to even begin to see long-term affects of TBI.

I know, because I had a brother-in-law who suffered from severe traumatic brain injury. He was not a soldier in Iraq, but an American who spent his life doing all the right things like paying taxes and planning for his family, just like many of our soldiers. He, like our soldiers, was brave. He could not go to war because he battled instead a brain malformation that left him often incapacitated and unable to work or care for his six-month-old son. In an effort to survive, he underwent 15 hours in surgery only to awake five months later with severe TBI.

TBI is not usually caused by surgery; most notably it is a result of car accidents. There are also many cases in the U.S. that occur because of gunshot wounds and, since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers are retuning with brain injury due to IEDs (improvised explosive devise).

Many of us are in the process of learning about TBI due to war. I learned firsthand by spending two heartbreaking years with my sister watching as her husband's muscles contracted mercilessly causing tremendous pain, no drug worked to ease it. I watched as his personality changed daily, as he drifted from one reality to another. He could only be fed by a tube and often drifted off to sleep in mid sentence. (Note, I'm only telling the publishable things here).

Rest of article at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patricia-degennaro/a-soldiers-tragedy-iron_b_74174.html