I recently decided to try to upgrade my disability benefits from the Army, seeing as I never really applied for anything, and they just arbitrarily gave me 10 percent for having crushed a vertebra in my back during a parachute accident. So this is what I sent them:
PTSD
Sorry, I know this wasn’t part of the original claim. My second husband did three tours in Viet Nam and thought people who claimed to have PTSD were weak. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he had PTSD, which is why we are no longer married.
I didn’t claim PTSD because I was never in a combat situation, although I WAS shot at, TWICE, by my own people. One time in Iraq we inadvertently flew through a free fire zone where they were blowing off extra artillery rounds, post war, and the spotter helicopter didn’t see us until one landed close enough to our helicopter to freak out the crew chief in the back. I wasn’t terribly traumatized by that.
The other time was back at Fort Bragg, when I and four others from our company had the misfortune to gather at Towle Stadium for a makeup PT test on October 7, 1995. The incoming task force was gathered for a motivational run and we waited by the bleachers for them to leave. Unfortunately, we were standing where the unit leaders normally stood, as they faced the formation. It was dark and foggy, and the shooter hiding in the woods (whom I most likely traipsed right past as I parked my car that morning and cut through the woods to the PT track) probably thought we were his enemies, the task force leaders and started firing on us first, taking down two of my guys, one who is still in a wheelchair. Once he realized that the formation was facing the other direction and the leaders were on the OTHER side, he started targeting them, but the damage was done.
I got a medal for that, an ARCOM, and I have no idea why. For remaining calm, for taking care of our wounded, for not blabbing about it all to the newsies (our leadership seemed intensely worried about keeping our whole involvement hush-hush — they even checked Abe into the hospital under a fake name). Whatever. Not my most treasured medal.
What else — oh, I was raped at Taszar, our relief spot in the Hungary/Bosnia area of operations, where you could actually drink alcohol in the Bosnia theater. I never officially reported it. I was so humiliated. I should never have been so drunk and stupid, and I didn’t resist, since I was too busy throwing up at the time. I did tell the medical staff who treated me for the subsequent STD (herpes). (This was a subsequent tour in the NY National Guard, where they grabbed a bunch of instructor pilots, maintenance pilots and crew chiefs from around the state, put us all in a “unit” and deployed us shortly after I joined the guard post my resignation from the Army. Needless to say, after my one-year tour in the Bosnia theater, I left the Guard as well.)
So, I never wanted to claim PTSD. But even now, I still have dreams about being back in the Army, somewhere on the other side of the world with no idea of when and how I’m going to get home. When we went to the first Gulf War, the whole stinking Army ended up over there. We joked about how the last people out of Fort Bragg should turn out the lights and bring the sign. We knew there was no one to replace us. We were there till it ended. We talked about Korea and Viet Nam and how long those wars lasted. I think that’s what still haunts my dreams.
So yeah, I think maybe I have PTSD.
GULF WAR SYNDROME and MALARIA
Shortly after returning from the first Gulf War, I began having a number of bizarre physical ailments. I had stood around many a burn pit (we called them trash fires) during my time in the desert. We had nothing else to do. We weren’t needed there. We were so far to the west we were almost all the way to Jordan. We stood around the trash fires at night to have a little human contact and conversation. I tried to keep a bit of a distance, because they burned everything and anything, and I knew that a lot of people got Cheese Whiz in their care packages, and the empty cans ended up in the fire. God knows what could go off and hurt you. I later met a guy who had a nasty scar above his eye from a can of peaches that exploded and struck him with shrapnel. The part I couldn’t believe was that someone would throw out a perfectly good can of peaches.
I had body aches and pains, and sometimes I would just suddenly have a fever, for no reason. I found that I could no longer do PT — physical training. I would be alright the first day, but two days later, when it was time to run again, I felt like I was wearing lead sneakers. Also, after running, I frequently had severe bowel pain, cramping and diarrhea. This pattern continued all the way up until I PCSed to a one-year tour in Honduras. I went to the medical clinic on the airfield many times, with different claims, trying to get help but they never found anything wrong with me. At the end, they insinuated that I was depressed, which I WAS because I was having all these medical problems. I was looking forward to going to Honduras, but I was terrified that they would find out I was a physical wreck and send me back.
Fortunately, my unit in Honduras did not conduct regulated physical training, as long as you passed your annual PT test. I had always excelled on my PT test, so I was relieved to be able to take care of myself, rest when I needed to and exercise when I felt able. No more bowel cramps, exhaustion, body aches, etc. I was okay while I was in Honduras, and I even participated in their monthly 10K runs around the base, although my time was frustratingly SLOW.
One thing I do remember during my time in Honduras was that my husband repeatedly sent me articles about Gulf War syndrome (by mail, there was no such thing as email and text back then) and he would write on the article “this is YOU!” BTW he’s a retired colonel now so he’s not a nut job.
When I left Honduras, I went to Fort Rucker for the Black Hawk instructor pilot course. While I was there, I took a regimen of chloroquine and primaquine tablets for pretty much the whole time I was there, as I remember it. Then I went to my unit, back at Fort Bragg, 2/82nd Airborne this time. I arrived shortly before Christmas. December 26th, I went for a run by myself (as yes, I used to do that when I was off duty) and felt kind of funny, body aches, weakness in the lower back. I came home and started shaking violently and immediately spiked a fever of 103.
This became my life. I initially tried to hold off the fevers by taking my husband’s giant ibuprofen horse pills known as “GI candy” — he got them for his knees — but the fevers eventually came on, and after they broke, and I sweated out every bit of liquid in my body.
I did what I normally do when I get sick or injured, curl up on my couch and wait for it to pass, but it did not pass. After New Year’s, it was time to go back to work, so I was forced to show up for PT formation at 6:30, shiver through all of the announcements (it was an exceptionally cold winter) and as soon as they said “sick, lame and lazy, fall out” I would trudge up the hill to a couple of spare offices that served as a sort of sick call triage.
At sick call, you saw an enlisted guy with an “if/then” questionnaire. “Is the patient female? Yes. Is the patient pregnant?” “Ma’am, could you be pregnant?” You never actually saw a doctor or any kind of medical personnel. The enlisted fellow took your results into another room, to consult with a physician’s assistant, who gave you a quarters slip, so you could go home for 24, 36 or 72 hours.
I got 72 hours quarters multiple times. It was really cold and the first time they had had snow in Fayetteville, North Carolina in decades, if not more. Everybody had the flu. And if you were in the 82nd Airborne Division and you didn’t feel like you could run 4 miles that morning, you went to sick call. So, I was completely blown off.
It’s not like I didn’t try. Since they didn’t seem to care about the frequent fevers I told them about my perpetual headache so they sent me for a sinus X-ray. I arrived at the airfield clinic around 8:30 that morning (after sick call if you had a test or a continuing consult you went to the airfield where the flight surgeon would attend after he had cleaned himself up from PT.) I was having one of my fevers. They seemed to happen at about that time every other day, and I couldn’t even sign my name because I was shaking so violently. They put me on a table and the flight surgeon came in, and immediately started ushering other workers in to come and see a “classic case of influenza.”
He told me that my muscles would probably be sore the next day from all the violent shaking (I wanted to ask him why, since I do this all the time, but I was too weak to argue.) He told me there was nothing he could do and I should go home and push fluids. I had to have my husband come and drive me home because once again I was too weak to drive myself.
There were other times — at one time I even got an IV because I was so dehydrated. Most days at home I just laid on my couch listening to the TV all day. My husband would mix up a gallon jug of Gatorade for me before he went to work in the morning, and help me up the stairs to bed at night.
After nearly a month of torture, I awoke one morning with a painful, swollen abdomen. I went to sick call, and “is the patient pregnant’ sent me to the clinic for a pregnancy test. I was too weak to make it upstairs to the lab, so the nice lady who worked there came down and took my blood, which she later told me came out like water. She immediately ran a hematocrit test and found mine to be 26 (kind of low).
The flight surgeon who finally showed up was baffled, and called the internal medicine guy at Womack Army Hospital, who said I should come right over. Of course there was no ambulance or anything available, so I had to ask someone from my new unit to give me a ride.
At Womack, someone finally asked me the question, “Have you been out of the country in the last year?” DUH.
After being diagnosed with malaria, and having several doctors introduce themselves to me and explain that they were taking over my case, but they had no knowledge of malaria and they were going to go home and read up on it, at MIDNIGHT that night, I finally got some chloroquine to combat the parasites. I woke up the next morning embroiled in the dreaded fever, burning up, 103 degrees for hours because all they would give me was acetaminophen, which had long been proven (at least in my case) ineffective against Plasmodium vivax.
Long story short, after a brief stay in the pneumonia ward — because you know, they both end in ya, pneumonia and malaria — I was moved to a semi-private room, had a brief spell where my spleen got so big that my left lung had no room to expand and I had to be put on oxygen, and the doctor said he hoped he didn’t have to remove my spleen because that would require emergency surgery and I “didn’t have any reserve left” — didn’t know what that meant at the time but pretty sure it wasn’t a good thing. Then FINALLY when my hematocrit rebounded to a whopping 18, they released me from the hospital, with a warning to not play any contact sports until my spleen got smaller. At the time, I couldn’t even make it up a flight of stairs, really.
So, after telling me that I might feel like I was getting malaria again (weird that they said that) but that it most likely wouldn’t actually be malaria, I did go back, multiple times, because I DID have a relapse almost exactly every 70 days. They gave me more chloroquine and primaquine, then they thought maybe it was misdiagnosed and might be falciparum, and treated me for that, and nothing seemed to work. So then they just upped the dose of primaquine, which is what I’m pretty sure the Honduras bugs developed a resistance to, based on knowledge I acquired later as a mosquito control specialist, until the last time I was treated, I was taking a double dose of primaquine for twice the recommended amount of time. By the time I finished that regimen I was exhausted, and could barely get out of bed. (Primaquine is VERY hard on the liver.)
So, flash forward to now. I have never fully recovered. I was never able to maintain the required pace for the 18th Airborne Corps 4-mile run, despite a history of running 10Ks and maximum PT test scores. I woke up every day with a bottle of ibuprofen and water beside my bed, which I would take 30 minutes before getting up. I had body aches. I had bowel cramps and diarrhea after running, which often left me laying on my bed for hours after showering post PT.
As a pilot, it never came to a head. I spent a lot of time flying at night, so I didn’t have to attend PT every day. I don’t know what would have happened if I did. But I was an NVG pilot and an instructor pilot so no one seemed to notice if I got back from PT at 10:00 or even later instead of 9:00 a.m.
But as for the 4-mile runs, I could never keep up. It’s not like I didn’t try. It’s not like I stopped and walked. I kept up for as long as I could, usually 2 miles or so, and then, very so slowly, I started to wane. At some point I had to slip to the side, and then I kept running alongside the formation, until I was at the back of the formation. I still kept running, until we got done, and I was maybe a quarter mile or half a mile behind the formation. But I just couldn’t keep up, and that was frowned upon by my leadership, tremendously. I wasn’t physically “sick” so they felt there was no real reason I couldn’t keep up.
Now, decades later, I remember one of my doctors saying “you shouldn’t have been that sick” about the malaria. I remember them testing me for mononucleosis. They thought about taking a liver biopsy. I remember after one blood test, someone asking me if I had exercised recently, because something in my bloodwork indicated that my body was tearing down muscles as though I had just run a marathon. I had not exercised in several days.
It occurs to me now that many of the symptoms that I had after “recovering” from the malaria were very similar to what I was suffering from after the first Gulf War. When I left the Amy, I never got a full exam. I was scheduled for an exam at Walter Reed because I was transitioning to Canada, where my husband was scheduled to be the Army Attaché. But on that day, there was a tremendous snowstorm, and my Mazda Miata was not up to the task, and I had to turn around and go back to where I was staying (following behind a bus.).
I just wanted to get out of the Army at the time. I was sick and tired and could no longer keep up. I had body aches, fibromyalgia, and digestive disorders, although most of my problems seemed to be related to physical exercise. I could work out once a week and that was fine. Any more than that, I found I could not recover from. As I said, looking back, I don’t know how much was from the malaria, which is the only thing I claimed at the time, and since it no longer showed up in my bloodwork, the Army said was not a thing. But my problems are a thing. I was deprived of being able to achieve retirement benefits from the Army. I still have fibromyalgia, body aches and occasional digestive disorders. Just as in Honduras, I rest when I need to, exercise when I can, and try to take care of myself. But that’s not 100%. It’s really not.
SLEEP APNEA
I’m sorry, I don’t remember the year. I broke my nose. I know it sounds stupid, but I walked into a doorway. I was looking behind me and turned my head at the last second and WHAP. Deviated septum. Unfortunately it was a Friday night and I didn’t go to sick call until Monday morning and they said that that if I had come right in they could have smacked it right back in place.
So, I went to the first Gulf War, looking like Meryl Streep, as my husband described it. When I got back, the nose people called me and scheduled me for surgery. I thought everything went okay, but ever since, I have not been able to breathe properly through the right side of my nose. If I take a deep breath, the right nostril collapses.
I was never a snorer, when I grew up. I am now. Ask my sister, she freaks out about it. She worries about it. But I NEVER had this problem before, in my life. Whether it’s the accident that caused the deviated septum, or the surgery, I think my (severe) sleep apnea comes from my time in service.
NECK PROBLEMS
I have submitted evidence about the weight of early night vision goggle devices plus helmets on a pilot’s neck. I was one of two female pilots to graduate in a class of 86 in 1986. At that time, male pilots used neck exercise machines to increase their neck circumference in order to outwit fat/weight testing results. Women did not. Our scrawny little necks carried the same weight, night after night, year after year, and I believe were substantially damaged from the stress over time, as I was a NVG pilot and instructor pilot for 10 years. In 2010 I experienced a spontaneous episode of one herniated and two bulging discs in my neck, which left me crippled for a brief period of time. I discovered the miracle of traction and continue to use an inversion table on a daily basis to keep my entire spinal system in alignment.
However, I have submitted my neck MRI as evidence of the excessive wear and tear on my cervical spine over the years of my military service.
TMJ
I don’t remember the date, but it was during my first tour at Fort Bragg, that I had my wisdom teeth removed. That dentist used a device that spread my jaw so wide that afterwards and ever since when I open my mouth too wide I get a popping sensation on both sides which I have come to learn is called temporomandibular joint disorder.
Yeah, so — I just think I should get more than a lousy 10 percent. What do YOU think?
Lissa and Peewee's Life Makeover 