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WIFE OF SEVERELY STRICKEN SOLDIER TELLS STORY OF

INJURY AND REHAB -- "The speech is coming along. That's

going to be his biggest challenge in the long run."

For more about traumatic brain injury, use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/sessearch.php?q=traumatic+brain&op=ph

Story here... http://seattlepi.nwsource.
com/local/6420AP_WA_Road_to_Recovery.html

Story below:

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-------------------------

Wife of severely stricken soldier tells story of injury, rehab

By MICHAEL GILBERT
THE NEWS TRIBUNE

TACOMA, Wash. -- Hundreds of soldiers just home from Iraq with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division have felt the effects of mild traumatic brain injury.

A relative few - about 10 - survived more severe head wounds from blasts or gunshots and were flown to military hospitals in Germany and the United States, said Lt. Col. Michael Oshiki, the surgeon for the Fort Lewis brigade.

Capt. Patrick Horan is one of them.

The night of July 7, the 35-year-old platoon leader was coming down from a Baghdad rooftop where his soldiers had been watching a roadway. That's when a nervous Iraqi army soldier at an outpost across the street mistakenly opened fire, according to what Army officials told Horan's wife, Patty. The bullet struck her husband under the rim of his helmet, just behind his left temple.

He has spent the subsequent months recovering first at Bethesda (Md.) Naval Medical Center and, since Aug. 23, at the private Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, where he's learning to walk and talk again.

"He's come a long way," Patty Horan said in a phone interview. "When he got here he couldn't lift his head off the pillow. Now he's walking down the hallway with a cane.

"The speech is coming along. That's going to be his biggest challenge in the long run."

Dr. Felise Zollman, Horan's doctor and director of brain injury medicine and rehab programs at the Chicago center, said every moderate to severe brain injury is unique.

"It's very difficult to measure Pat up against some kind of objective timeline," Zollman said. "I think he's made great progress. He's made the kind of progress I would expect, and that I'd hoped he would."

Horan isn't the only soldier from his Fort Lewis unit the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment to receive care at Bethesda for a severe brain injury.

Another is Spc. Kevin Mowl of Pittsford, N.Y., who remains there after he was critically wounded Aug. 2 in a bombing that killed three other men on his Stryker.

The 22-year-old infantryman has overcome persistent infection and awaits another operation. His family maintains a daily diary of his care and recovery at http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/kevinmowl.

Patty Horan said that as her husband improved at Bethesda to the point where he was ready to begin rehabilitation, she struggled about where to take him next.

Social workers at the military hospital encouraged her to move him into the care of the Veterans Administration, which maintains four major TBI centers: in Tampa, Fla.; Richmond, Va.; Minneapolis; and Palo Alto, Calif.

Richmond would have been close to her and Patrick's hometowns in Virginia. She also toured the Tampa facility, as well as four or five private hospitals, she said.

But she'd heard that the first several months of rehab are critical to the patient's long-term recovery. And patients she saw at Bethesda who'd come back from Chicago for cranioplasty having sections of their skulls replaced after swelling in their brains subsided "looked good, like they made a good recovery."

In the end, she didn't have as much confidence in the VA as she did in the Chicago center.

"I was just too nervous from what I read on the blogs, and in some reports," she said.

As an active-duty soldier, Horan has his care covered by the Army. The couple have no children, and no family in Chicago; Patty gets per diem from the Army to cover her apartment a short walk from the center. They have a few friends in town, and a support group at the center has been a great help, she said.

She's not alone among military family members who have pushed to have their wounded service members placed in private TBI rehab centers.

It's a move endorsed by Col. Rocco Armonda, a Bethesda surgeon and leading TBI specialist, among others, who told the Boston Globe in September that the VA centers lack the capacity to handle the most complex cases.

Patty Horan said she had to go with her gut feeling. In another few weeks her husband will likely return to Bethesda for cranioplasty, and soon after he likely will move to another rehabilitation center in Washington, D.C.

"I feel like it's gone well," she said. "I don't know if it's luck or just the nature of his injuries. At times it is very confusing. There's lots of red tape in the Army, questions about where to go, what's the best place to get care, and you feel like you're pushed into this situation you know nothing about.

"But for me, Pat is making a lot of progress, and I feel good about that."

-------------------------

Larry Scott  --

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