CCAT team that transports patients from Iraq to the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and from there to Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in Washington, D.C. New England Journal of Medicine, December 9, 2004
My friend Leata and I went to lunch on Monday to a little restaurant in Covington, which unfortunately for me, will be open only for dinner after Friday. I may be the only person that truly craves broccoli and spinach, and I could get it here. I will get over it.
As we were finishing, our regular waitress asked if we might know of any jobs, she could be unemployed as soon as the end of the week. There is a job opening at the library, and we suggested she come in and fill out an application, but she said she could only work until 2:30 in the afternoons, she had to look after her "special needs child."
Well, sometimes, we hear that term a little too much. Everybody’s child has special needs of one sort of another, and I guess she saw our doubt in our faces. She said, “Wait, I’ll let you meet her.â€
The waitress comes back with a little girl in her arms, she looked to be maybe 5 years old, and she had some pretty serious physical disabilities. Her arms stopped right below her elbows, ending in something visually similar to slim flippers. Her skin was tight, and just barely translucent, and her eyes were evasive like you see sometimes with children and adults with severe mental disabilities. I was reminded of the photos I’d seen of children born in the years after Hiroshima and Chernobyl, children born damaged from toxins and environmental disasters.
Our waitress told us her daughter was 19, she’d been able to enroll her daughter in school until she was 18, but now, until she was 21, there were no programs that she could afford to enroll her child in during the daytime.
This child, and she will always be one, and will always be dependent, apparently has been left behind. And her mother will always be part of the working poor, because, she’ll never be able to get a “regular†job, as long as her daughter is alive, and there are bosses who’ll sneer in your face, “What’s more important to you, having a job or being with your family?†(I know, I had one, but he died and went to hell.)
Meeting our waitress’s daughter has been haunting me since Monday. So many things about it are just wrong. I think my friends here might feel the same way.
But wait. What about all of our young soldiers that will be returning home, and returning home with injuries, injuries that will forever change who they are, and their places in this world.
Have you all ever thought about the injuries that our soldiers are suffering? And what happens to a young person, maybe 19 years old, that comes back, alive, but not the person that he or she once was, are we going to just dump them on their parents, or maybe a young spouse? Will we tell them that until they are 21, there will be no place that young person can be placed, so that the family can continue to earn a living?
Horrific injuries are not easy to look at. I remember when I was taking my first responder courses, our books had a color pictorial on farming accidents (which in my little town, it’s much more probable that I’d encounter), which God forbid, can be horrible. Will we be able to look our injured in the face and talk to them, and treat them with respect and dignity, or will we have to turn away?
I am starting to see young men and women coming home, minus limbs, some with traumatic head injuries. These are injuries that would have killed men and women in battle a decade ago. Now, these injured soldiers survive. How will we treat them? How will we provide for them? What will we do with these soldiers who could too easily loose their families and face homelessness, like our Vietnam Vets faced?
Americans will have to face this and it will be soon.
ADDED 10/5/2005: I am concerned most of all, that right now, we are incapable of assisting those of us most needing assistance. I feel sure that history will repeat itself in the way we will treat our returning veterans.
Veterans have returned, like Georgia's POW hero, Ron Young, Jr. (you may know him better from his appearance in CBS's Amazing Race 7), and our media embraces him, because he's handsome and photogenic, he cuts a striking figure on film and in print.
I feel that our media and our hearts will not be so quick to embrace those who are returned to us as damaged in body and spirit. I wish it weren't so, but hindsight tells me a different story.
