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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The forgotten American victims of the Bush wars
Posted by Jill | 5:46 AM
And so they are starting to trickle home, these men and women, many of whom enlisted in the military after the 9/11 attacks with the purest of motives -- what they believed to be a fight to both avenge the attacks and to dismantle the groups that made such an attack possible. Those missing legs, arms, and eyes come home as soon as they are well enough to travel after injury. But sometimes there are invisible injuries that are just as serious, and they are coming home to a country whose government offers little to help them, and nothing to help the forgotten new victims of these wars -- the people who love them and now care for them, who, in this Ron Paul paradise in which our veterans live, they have to rely on private organizations (NYT link):
Since Mr. Marcum came back in 2008 from two tours in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, his wife has quit her job as a teacher to care for him. She has watched their life savings drain away. And she has had to adjust to an entirely new relationship with her husband, who faces a range of debilitating problems including short-term memory loss and difficulties with impulse control and anger.

“The biggest loss is the loss of the man I married,” Ms. Marcum said, describing her husband now as disconnected on the best days, violent on the worst ones. “His body’s here, but his mind is not here anymore. I see glimpses of him, but he’s not who he was.”

Ms. Marcum has joined a growing community of spouses, parents and partners who, confronted with damaged loved ones returning from war who can no longer do for themselves, drop most everything in their own lives to care for them. Jobs, hobbies, friends, even parental obligations to young children fall by the wayside. Families go through savings and older parents dip into retirement funds.

Even as they grieve over a family member’s injuries, they struggle to adjust to new routines and reconfigured relationships.

The new lives take a searing toll. Many of the caregivers report feeling anxious, depressed or exhausted. They gain weight and experience health problems. On their now-frequent trips to the pharmacy, they increasingly have to pick up prescriptions for themselves as well.

While taking comfort that their loved ones came home at all, they question whether they can endure the potential strain of years, or even decades, of care.

“I’ve packed my bags, I’ve called my parents and said I’m coming home,” said Andrea Sawyer, whose husband has been suicidal since returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder. “But I don’t. I haven’t ever physically walked out of the house.”

Those attending to the most severely wounded must help their spouses or adult children with the most basic daily functions. Others, like Ms. Marcum, act as safety monitors, keeping loved ones from putting themselves in danger. They drive them to endless medical appointments and administer complicated medication regimens.

One of the most frustrating aspects of life now, they say, is the bureaucracy they face at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs, from problems with the scheduling of medical appointments to being bounced around among different branches of the system, forcing them to become navigators and advocates for their loved ones.

A variety of care services are offered to the severely injured. But many family members do not want their loved ones in nursing homes and find home health services often unsatisfactory or unavailable.

Despite Ms. Marcum’s cheerful manner and easy laugh, she has started taking antidepressants and an anti-anxiety medication when needed. She has developed hypertension, takes steroids for a bronchial ailment that may be stress related and wears braces to relieve a jaw problem.

“I just saw all of my dreams kind of vanishing,” she said.

Over the past few years, advocacy organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project lobbied Congress to enact a law providing direct financial compensation and other benefits to family caregivers of service members. In 2010 they succeeded, and by mid-September, the veterans agency had approved 1,222 applications, with average monthly stipends of $1,600 to $1,800. Caregivers can also receive health insurance and counseling.

“We know it doesn’t replace full lost income,” said Deborah Amdur, who oversees caregiver support for the agency. “It’s really a recognition of the kinds of sacrifices that are being made.”


Read the linked article, and then think about recent Republican rhetoric about lazy people who don't work, and about how we simply cannot ask the people whose interests these men and women went to protect, to pay even one thin dime more towards their care, and about how the needy should depend on charity instead of the government. What kind of a country are we that we would let these people get away with rhetoric like this, let alone seriously consider them as presidential timber? How can we be proud of a country that uses its young men and women like this and then brings them home and throws them on the trash heap of history while at the same time using the threat of terrorism to justify continued military spending on everything BUT the care of those who actually fight? Where is the yellow ribbon magnet crowd now? Why aren't they clamoring for better care for these people?

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Wednesday, September 16, 2009

An American Ending
Posted by Bob | 3:10 PM
SC man died hungry, solo in tent, baffling friends

ANDERSON, S.C. — Friends of a 39-year-old South Carolina man are trying to figure out why he never reached out for help before dying broke and alone in a zipped-up tent on the banks of a lake.

Bright but reclusive Civil War buff David Condon lost his job at a local museum and fell behind on his rent.

Sometime in early July he disappeared. On Labor Day weekend, a group of college kids vacationing at a condo complex a few hundred yards from his tent peeked inside and found his body. The local coroner says he died of pneumonia, made worse by malnutrition. He was dehydrated and had lost 50 pounds in a few months.

His best friend, Craig Drennon, saw no sign Condon was having money problems or spiraling into despair when the two got together nearly every week to drink beers and play backgammon.
The people calling themselves Condon's "friends," he probably - & more accurately - considered "acquaintances." His disappearance alarmed no one enough to go looking for him. They ought to ask themselves exactly what they could have & would have done for the man. Passed the hat? Treated him to lunch at Burger King? Stored his possessions for him when he was evicted? Suggested he work part-time at Walmart so he could make his car payments & sleep in the backseat? Urged him to seek more help from government & nonprofit agencies? Condon knew he was up shit creek without a paddle, putting up a false front for as long as he could, then withdrawing into his humiliation & sparing others his personal misery. They ought to thank him for not interrupting their backgammon to beg for spare change.

What happened to Condon is about as authentically American an ending in 2009 as one can have, dying homeless, hungry, & mentally & physically wasted at the edge of a wealthy society that extolls self-reliance over all other personal qualities, advertises "a dollar & a dream," begrudges providing basic health care to all its citizens & won't even crack down on a financial industry that rewards failure with multi-million dollar bonuses.

I wouldn't be surprised if Condon had a useless Blackberry with no wireless service & a dead battery in his pocket.

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Friday, February 06, 2009

Justice, Florida-style
Posted by Jill | 8:08 PM
If you ever needed to see a microcosm of wingnut policies at work, here you go:
NAPLES — It was a girl.

Doctors removed the dead fetus from Joan Laurel Small on Thursday, a day after her release from the Collier County jail.

The 22-year-old mother cradled baby “Elena Laurel.” Nurses cut a lock of the baby’s hair for a keepsake.

“They cleaned her up and allowed her to hold her,” said Small’s mother, Jennifer Graeber of New Jersey. “The hospital is making her a little remembrance book. They’re putting in a lock of the baby’s hair.”

Graeber said when her daughter arrived at The Birth Place at NCH North Naples Hospital, her blood-pressure had risen and she had a fever.

“That’s the beginning signs of septic shock,” Graeber said of leaving a dead fetus inside a mother.

Because the baby had been left in her womb more than a day, she said, Small could not deliver the baby, but had to undergo a C-section.

[snip]

She’d been held since Dec. 22 after she violated probation by returning home after her nightly 10 p.m. curfew. Small said she’d been attending a parenting class in Naples and couldn’t get a ride home; she has no car. Records show the probation violation involved a 2007 drug charge; an adjudication of guilt was withheld. It’s her only criminal conviction and records show it occurred when she was caught with drugs in the car of her former husband, Ken Enright Small, during a traffic stop; his record includes drug convictions.ock,” Graeber said of leaving a dead fetus inside a mother.


Where the hell does one even START with this? Here's a woman being held in jail on probation for a drug violation that is in itself questionable. On a day when some lunatics in South Carolina are considering prosecuting Michael Phelps based on nothing but a fucking PHOTOGRAPH, perhaps we might at last get some discussion going on the insane "war on drugs" which in Naples, Florida -- a state with more than its share of fetophile lunatic wingnuts -- is now responsible for infanticide. It's all here -- the gap between rich and poor, our appalling criminal justice system, the inherent misogyny in busting this woman for a probation violation BECAUSE SHE WAS LATE COMING HOME FROM A PARENTING CLASS, the double standard of so-called pro-lifers who think nothing of risking the life of a WANTED baby while trying to force women who don't want to carry to term to do so.

As you watch the Republicans behave as if they won the November election, and the Democrats crouching again in a fetal position in the corner, as the economy crashes and burns around us, and as the Joe Scarboroughs and Chris Matthewses of the world decide that a failed presidency makes good copy -- preparing the country for perhaps a Republican triumphant restoration in 2010, go back and read this article about Joan Laurel Small and her dead baby -- and look at what "conservative values" do to those who aren't in their little club.

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