Tag Archives: the dogdamned VA

…And At This Point, I Don’t See It Stopping Anytime Soon

Courtesy of amandaw I bring you this stellar article that once again rubs in my face how brilliantly miserable the VA is scratching the surface of realizing what is wrong with they way they even see women veterans. If you read along carefully you can even see the lightly sugar-coated condescension artfully woven in TIME writer Laura Fitzpatrick’s story. It really is a piece of work, from the dismissive way she re-counts the testimony of the “presumed” treatment of a victim survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a medical professional (because they NEVER do THAT) down to the detailed description of the very girlie attire of the staff at the impressively mostly women-run facility in Palo Alto. I crave to read the way a man’s shoes click-clack on a hospital hall’s floors in such a manner. But it is a very cliche description etched in the halls of descriptive-writing history, INORITE, so who am I to argue with the laws of good writing. I am, after all, only an amateur.

The news isn’t that the VA is failing women veterans. I’ve known that for quite some time. Really, I have. I have encountered some of the treatment described to some degrees first-hand:

I remember having to hunt around for a toilet in an ill-fitting paper gown at my own exit screening, past several other open, occupied exam rooms. I was the only woman there. They had no sanitary napkin to offer me and it was an embarrassing scene trying to find a place where I could insert a tampon. I was fighting back tears when I finally found a (presumably) unisex bathroom.

So My Dear Friend Ms. Fitzpatrick’s dismissal of Anuradha Bhagwati’s story, the one she gave as testimony before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs is ill-received. It isn’t too far-fetched for me to imagine the way she recounts “the ham-handed manner in which a male gynecologist, upon being told by a patient that she had been sexually assaulted, left the exam room and — presumably to beckon a female staff member — yelled down the hall, ‘We’ve got another one!'”. I can easily see the inept professionals at the inadequate facilities just stumbling over how to even grasp a way to provide basic courtesy to a patient who isn’t like them. And failing. Miserably.

The news here is that they seem to have no idea how to fix it, and no set, immediate time line in mind for seeing progress. Sure, Secretary of the VA, Eric K. Shinseki recently, at a forum at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, has said that he hopes to have the VA ready to serve 100% of veterans in 25 years, but what is going to happen to this generation of women veterans who are already being ignored? To the women veterans of the wars past who have been fighting for help all along already?

Because their concerns are already being swept aside. You can already see as things like their urinary-tract issues being categorized as simple “gender differences”, because women react to the desert differently. Sure, possibly. I’ve seen this intimated a few times. People looking to explain away womanly behavior in high stress situations. Oh! They didn’t want to stop the convoy! Well, why is that? Maybe because we know that women are far more likely to be killed by their fellow servicemembers than by combat in combat zones that they learned defense mechanisms, as confessed to by Col. Janis Karpinski. Women tended to drink less water, as little as they thought they could get away with, to avoid using latrines or having to stop roadside alone with men out of fear of sexual assault. And it killed some of them. If you remember, though, Karpinski was even dismissed as a woman scorned because of the Abu Ghraib scandal, anyhow, so we can’t win for losing. She was just ratting out her old boss because she got in trouble.

Some of it is true, though. Most of the VA’s 144 hospitals do not have the proper facilities to even offer privacy to non-men patients, let alone provide gynecological care, or as I mentioned above, pads. The TIME article notes a hospital in Salt Lake City which announced that it delivered its first baby this past October (the article mentions that its average patient is 78 and male), but the day after the little girl’s arrival they didn’t know how much she weighed (I cringe to think how much more they couldn’t provide) because they didn’t even have an infant scale.

Women veterans are spiking in numbers. They, funnily enough, are not the same as men. That means they are not the same as the average patient, such as that the Salt Lake City hospital are used to dealing with, and their health care with be different. Even if you line up the matching parts, the treatment for heart disease and blood pressure, to my lay knowledge, is not the same. The numbers have been growing since The Great War, and surged after we had the need to call the next one World War II. It took until 1988 for the VA to start providing even limited care to women veterans.

Today, women veterans in need of help from the VA are of an average age far younger than the average male veteran (for obvious reasons) and have different needs. They are at least twice as likely than civilian women to be homeless (with only 8 facilities in all the U.S. available to help homeless women veterans with children). They are likely to be mothers when they are. Many of them returning from combat zones — yes, combat zones, why do you ask? — are coming home to families and are more likely than their male counterparts to get divorced following combat connected tours. They are really damned likely to get asked if that is their husband’s or boyfriend’s shirt they are wearing, or asked for their husband’s social by a thoughtless agent on the phone. They are the forgotten in war. Doubly so if they served in a branch of the military that isn’t on the forefront of the public’s mind as “really the military” (as slave2tehtink has said, Aircraft carriers tend to not be zipped around by civilians, yo). Extra-specially so if you had a thinkin’ job, like “nuke” or “spook”, and your Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or Military Sexual Trauma (MST) didn’t happen “In Country” (Iraq or Afghanistan), the only sanctioned places where these things can occur, you know.

It’s frustrating as hell. And while I don’t believe that the VA is intentionally forgetting about us, I don’t believe that they are doing everything that they can to make sure that it gets better faster.

And honestly, I don’t think writers like Ms. Fitzpatrick are helping. But maybe I am jaded and have been at this for too long. But the VA needs an overhaul, stat. Pretty words from the Secretary of the VA and promises that it will be better in a couple of decades just aren’t good enough.

New VA Research Could Explain Lasting Effects of PTSD

Gentle readers! I come to you today with a delighted feeling that I do not believe is caused by the half life if a painkiller! Today I read an article in my paper version of Stars and Stripes that had to do with the intersection of disability and veterans and I was not instantly thrown into a bout of contemptuous paper shredding! I mean, really, I could make party favors and possibly go into business selling paper mache animals for children to beat with broom handles in hopes of gathering candy! But I am a slightly morbid person some days, especially when the painkillers aren’t working.

But in all seriousness, this article, about the long term effects of PTSD on the body, has some points which I will now discuss with you in a non-concise manner! Not the least of these details, relegated to two brief paragraphs, is the fact that the people at the VA are doing one study specifically aimed at women who served in the Vietnam War, acknowledging that while women did not serve in combat, that the war affected them in very real ways:

Women did not serve in combat during the Vietnam War but many experienced trauma while serving as nurses and care providers to the wounded returning from battlefield, Magruder said.

“No one has studied the mental health of these women,” she said. “Their experiences were certainly different than the men, but they had other experiences. Some of these women were the last people to hold the hand of an 18-year-old kid who was dying.”

Gee, their experiences were different from men, you say? No kidding? *ahem*

One of the biggest myths that I encounter, being the go-to girl on military matters in some social justice blogging circles is that combat veterans have the patent on PTSD, which is not only incorrect, but also erases the experiences of countless other people whose lives are destroyed by the ways that PTSD is still misunderstood. I’ll take two paragraphs if it means that the VA is finally getting around to accepting the idea that ladies might actually have what it takes to handle the VA being wrong (about ladies having PTSD, that is).

The VA is now trying to weasel out of the fact that they were ordered to look into this PTSD business a long time ago — a decade but who’s counting, amirite? — but decided to throw Congress the bird and a “Ah do what Ah WANT!” Eric Cartman impression. The National Vietnam Veterans Longitudinal Study, expected to help create new policies and effect changes for incoming veterans with PTSD by 2013 might have actually done some good for people who are already having trouble convincing doctors at the VA that their condition is real if the VA could have been arsed to get this show on the road back then. A decade ago they were one less war behind.

It’s nice that they are starting to get around to looking into things like the correlation between living with PTSD for years and developing other conditions. Things like cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, asthma and diabetes are common among Vietnam vets who have been living with PTSD for decades, and according to the article there are some who believe even the immune system is affected by years with PTSD. But you can’t help anyone when you aren’t doing the research to find out how.

As the VA is becoming sandwiched between claimants from war era veterans from major wars that have left physical and mental scars on so many, it is important that they get their act together and start doing what they were told to do a long damned time ago. Having the longitudinal data from Vietnam veterans will more than likely prove useful as more and more people come home from two fronts to their old lives and attempt to readjust, and it could lead to better services for more veterans from any war. I can’t say that I have a lot of faith in them to get it together. As Charles Trumpower, a disabled Marine who tours the country speaking to veterans about PTSD notes, not a lot has changed in the last 35 years.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to see this research and this effort going underway, but wow, readers, should this have been done a long time ago. I can’t help but think of all the people that this could have helped.