A Time to Heal

Soldiers With Amputations Rebuild Lives at the Center for the Intrepid

By Janet Boivin, RN

Army Corporal Shane Parsons and Specialist Adrian Garcia are eagerly waiting for their new legs to arrive at the U.S. military's state-of-the-art rehabilitation center for wounded veterans in San Antonio.

Garcia, 20, and Parsons, 23, each lost both legs above the knee to explosive devices in Iraq. Garcia had been in Iraq for only 20 days when a rocket-propelled grenade ripped through the Humvee in which he was riding. "I knew something bad was happening," he says. "It was the most painful thing I ever felt."

Parsons was a month away from finishing his time in Iraq when his Humvee was demolished by a sophisticated roadside bomb. "[After the explosion] I was trying to put a tourniquet on my leg," he says. "You're supposed to take your boot off, and when I did, everything came with it."

Both men have been at Brooke Army Medical Center and The Center for the Intrepid, a rehabilitation center located on the same campus, for more than a year, Parsons almost two years now, recovering from their physical and psychological wounds. The circumstances of how Garcia and Parsons lost their legs are similar, but different factors have shaped their physical and mental rehabilitation.

Although the explosion that destroyed Garcia's legs would have been sufficient to cause post-traumatic stress disorder, he was not in Iraq long enough to have collected other disturbing memories of combat. He says he has not been diagnosed with the disorder. Parsons already had enough combat memories to trigger PTSD without the physical trauma of losing both legs. In addition, the blast wave from the explosion caused severe traumatic brain injury, from which he would also have to recover. Parsons has been diagnosed with PTSD.

As devastating as the loss of both legs would be for anyone, Parsons and Garcia had some advantages as they began rebuilding their lives. They were young, healthy, and in top physical shape when wounded. They also come from a military culture that demands discipline, hard work, and the setting and achieving of specific goals.

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Walter Reed – Scandal or Target of Opportunity?

Ever since the Washington Post story broke about wounded soldiers living in sub-standard housing and being caught in bureaucratic nightmares the left has been hammering President Bush about it. The articles created a wave of outrage in media outlets across the country and Democratic lawmakers all stepped up to the plate to take their swing at the administration with the end result being the firing of top Army personnel, such as the former commander of Walter Reed, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, MD. But now that the rush to blame has subsided and reforms are under way at Walter Reed where are the lawmakers, were they really concerned about the troops or were they all using them as stage props, for their re-election campaign?

Walter Reed as a community hasn’t taken these accusations lightly and one of the problems outlined in the Post articles has already been addressed - the lack of sufficient case managers to manager the treatment and eventual discharge of our wounded warriors. Recently twenty-eight Army nurses from bases as far away as Alaska have been reassigned to Walter Reed in an effort to update and modernize the Case Management functions of the Warrior Transition Brigade. Acting Army Surgeon General and Chief of the Army Nurse Corp, Maj. Gen Gale Pollock, RN called for the case managers as part of a series of step designed to improve outpatient services at Walter Reed and to bring case management within the Wounded Warrior program up to industry standards.

With the arrival of these additional nurses the patient to nurse ratio for case managers is now 17 patient s to every case manager well below the industry standard of 30/35 to one. The Wounded Warrior Transition Brigade follows the patient during both their inpatient as well as their outpatient stays at Walter Reed and it is hoped that the continuity of care will continue once the patients leave the hospital.

Pollock believes that while the Post articles were damning, they also provided the push to get things moving in the system to affect change. As anyone who has ever dealt with or visited Walter Reed can attest, these problems have been there for decades and it was simply the weight of the bureaucracy that kept things the way they were.

In this case the Post did us a favor and forced the bureaucracy to change or be removed. As it was, some of the bureaucracy was removed and we can only be thankful that these problems that out lawmakers should have been addressing decades ago were brought into the light of day.