Getting Home is Only Half the Battle
From the San Jose Mercury News:
For [Stephen] Edwards, 40, the symptoms began within weeks of his return home in February 2005. He barely slept, suffered excruciating migraines and was angered easily. He paced, constantly patrolled his house, checked and rechecked locked doors and windows. The VA diagnosed him with acute PTSD in April 2005, and it was clear he could not return to his civilian job as an audio technician.
"We'd walk to the coffee shop and he'd be looking at the rooftops for snipers," said his wife, Theresa Edwards, an executive assistant at a technology firm. "I always thought getting him home safe and alive was the hard part. I was not at all prepared for what to expect. He came home a completely different person."
Edwards changed. So did David Lintz, a Navy corpsman who worked at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and Will Palacio, an Army reservist whose 21-year-old nephew was killed in Iraq. So did Luis DeJesus, a Marine struggling to explain his PTSD to his young children, and Dave Sinclair, a young Army sniper.
Like Edwards, they have all come to the National Center for PTSD in Menlo Park, Calif. Read more >>
Want to stay connected? You can subscribe to PTSD Combat via Feedburner or follow Ilona on Twitter.
2011: Jan