It is going to take a lot of time and money to heal returning wounded service members – not only building their strength and healing their injuries but also giving back their confidence and Independence.
America’s Next War – Rehabilitating Wounded Warriors
America’s next fight will take place thousands of miles away from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, in special cities where some of the wars’ most grievously wounded troops begin their journeys to their new normal. TIME reporter Nate Rawlings, himself an Iraq War veteran, takes an inside look at Brooke Army Medical Center, a place where, as some have said, miracles are manufactured
By Nate Rawlings – San Antonio
TIME Specials
Sergeant Sebastian Gallegos is standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring at a carton of eggs on the counter. “You can do this,” his occupational therapist, Lisa Smurr, tells him. “It’s too easy.” He exhales and reaches toward the carton with his robotic right arm, which beeps three times before the pincer at the end of it closes around an egg. As he carries the egg toward a mixing bowl, the pincer tightens, cracking the shell. Gallegos’s sense of humor, however, is still intact. “At least I didn’t get my hands dirty,” he says.
On the second try, the broad-shouldered Marine picks up an egg with his prosthetic and breaks it cleanly into the bowl. After whisking it, he slowly, but flawlessly, cooks it in a pan. The exercise is part confidence builder, part rehabilitation, as Gallegos learns to use the complicated prosthetic he received only two weeks before.
(Watch TIME’s video “Soldiers’ Heart-to-Heart: A Story of Reunion and Recovery.”)
The kitchen sits on the top floor of the Center for the Intrepid, a state-of-the-art, $50 million rehabilitation facility for amputees and patients with salvaged limbs, at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) outside San Antonio. For wounded soldiers like Gallegos, who had his arm blown off by a roadside bomb in Sanguin, Afghanistan, making eggs counts as one of the many small victories being won as they return to America and fight a third war, which is likely to last longer and cost as much as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Treating the troops who were injured there is expected to cost as much as $867 billion in the coming decades as the focus shifts from critical injuries to long-term treatment for traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder. Seriously injured troops, including those with severe burns and mangled limbs, are coming to bases like this one where teams of doctors, physical therapists and prosthetic engineers push the warriors, as they call them, to be as active as they were before their injuries. Many of the patients with missing limbs are training for triathlons; others work out on climbing walls and in an indoor surfing tank. They spur each other on during training sessions and engage in a makeshift form of group therapy as they go about putting their lives back together.
Read the complete article – HERE
