War Maims

The trip to see Dad.  His last weekend of life.  That weekend of February 10-11, 1996.  My daughter, Sarah, was eight years old. Joshua, my son, was five years old.  Dad was seventy-four years old.  Mom was seventy years old.  I was thirty-six.

Dad was in Richmond, Virginia, at the McGuire Veterans Administration Hospital.  At that time McGuire had one of the largest Spinal Cord Injury Units in the country.  I used to call it "quad city" with its large halls and shopping places, banking areas, a recreation room, and a bowling alley - all designed for injured vets.  It seemed everywhere I looked there were men on their bellies, on gurneys, their bodies draped with white sheets as they rolled themselves through the hallways, turning the wheels round and round with their two limbs that functioned.  Maybe they were on gurneys to give their backsides a rest to keep from getting sores.

Dad wasn't on a gurney; he wouldn't have been able to push the wheels anyway.

Dad controlled his wheelchair with a knob.  He could move his arms and his elbows and wrists, but not his fingers. One of his doctors had called him an "odd quad."  It brought Dad a chuckle.  Most survivors of a spinal cord injury severed at C-4 couldn't move their shoulders or elbows. Dad's had been snapped in July, 1983 - a car accident, a head-on collision with a truck.  Dad was driving; he was alone.

Dad visited McGuire a few weeks every year on respite care.  But this time he was at McGuire because of some post-surgery trouble, after having part of his intestines removed. It seems like all this started sometime in the spring of 1995.  Prior to going to McGuire this time, he had spent some time in a nursing home. That only lasted, at the most, a couple months.  He hated being at the nursing home.

I get the time-table of events confused. It seems he had the surgery at a hospital in Hickory in North Carolina, then went to a nursing home in Hickory, then back to the hospital, then back to the nursing home, then to McGuire V.A. Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, since McGuire was equipped to handle spinal cord injury patients; plus Dad was a WWII veteran and the V.A. benefits were part of his package.  It seems the post-surgery complications had something to do with Dad being unable to swallow properly and maybe he even had some lung difficulty.  I recall his voice sounding like a raspy whisper, at times his regular bass sneaking through.

Up until all that started happening in the spring of 1995, he had been able to stay at home with Mom as his main caretaker.  Help came in from a home health agency.  Dawn was privately hired to help.  My husband and I helped out regularly, along with my brother.  My sister lived in Florida or California or near D.C., so she would visit once or twice a year.  Her then-husband, Jansen, was a Captain in the Navy and they were stationed at various bases around the country.

Jansen was a pilot.  He had flown Hueys in the Vietnam war.  He only talked about it once with me which was shortly after I had found The Way.  I thought I could empathize with his Nam tour because I knew of the spiritual battle; how naive of me. Jansen later flew some sort of jet off of aircraft carriers, some sort of sub-tracker.

I liked Jansen.  After I had left The Way Corps, back in 1980, I had considered going into one of the US armed services.  Jansen, who I think was a recruiter at the time, told me to not go into the service to "find myself."  He told me, "When you sign up for the service, you sign up for war."

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This is the first of a three-part series:
Part 1: War Maims
Part 2: Heart Failure
Part 3: Ashes
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