For War’s Gravely Injured, Challenge to Find Care

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When Staff Sgt. Jarod Behee was asked to select a paint color for the customized wheelchair that was going to be his future, his young wife seethed. The government, Marissa Behee believed, was giving up on her husband just five months after he took a sniper’s bullet to the head during his second tour of duty in Iraq...

In the eyes of five such relatives interviewed, the military health care system, which is so advanced in its treatment of lost limbs, has been scrambling to deal with an unanticipated volume of traumatic brain-injury cases that it was ill equipped to handle. Largely because of the improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq, traumatic brain injury has become a signature wound of this war, with 1,882 cases treated to date, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center.

In general, these caregivers said that their grievously wounded soldiers had either been written off prematurely or not given aggressive rehabilitation or options for care. From the beginning, they said, the government should have joined forces with civilian rehabilitation centers instead of trying to ramp up its limited brain-injury treatment program alone during a time of war. That way, soldiers would have had access to top-quality care at civilian institutions that were already operating at full throttle and might be closer to home...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/us/12trauma.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

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1. she persisteed...

Three months later, Sergeant Behee was walking unassisted and abandoned his government-provided wheelchair. Now 28, he works as a volunteer in the center’s outpatient gym, wiping down equipment and handing out towels. It is not the police job that he aspired to; his cognitive impairments are serious. But it is not a nursing home, either.