I’m the guy Guadaloopy is talking about. I shattered my ankle playing tackle football on the weekend with guys from my unit. This was in Savannah at hunter AAF. On the weekends the ER there is pretty much two EMTs and an ambulance. Dude unlaced my cleat and pulled it off (yea, super regard), it was like watching a marshmallow in a microwave. He says yep, that’s fucked, but orthopedics at Fort Stewart doesn’t open until Monday. Sends me home in a splint with 800mg Motrin to suffer for another day and a half.
X ray at ortho confirms it’s broke broke. It was a twisting injury, my cleat got planted with a guy wrapped around my leg while two other dudes spun me like a top. The ortho doc wanted to do surgery, but he got overruled by the department head. They put me in a cast and sent me home. After 3 weeks I had to get a new cast because of the swelling reduction. My leg was rattling around in the cast. I spent 2 months total in a cast then another month in a boot. I was never given any physical therapy other than a handout for stuff to do at home.
Needless to say my leg was never the same. My running gait was all fucked up because my ankle didnt work right. That led to a lot of knee pain, which led to more ranger candy. I left the service and didn’t claim anything for disability. Fast forward 10 years of rolled ankles and problems and I finally have a civilian doc look at things. He says the army docs were idiots for not addressing any of the ankle stability, and recommends reconstruction. At that point my ankle would roll stepping wrong on a carpet transition. I agreed, so in 2011 I had a modified brostrum procedure to shorten the loose ligaments and give me a functional ankle.
My wife and friends convinced me at that point to apply for benefits. I had felt like Guadaloopy that my injury wasn’t service related and I genuinely felt like it was disrespectful to guys that got real combat injuries. What changed was the immense anger at how shitty the service treated my injury that led to a lifetime of pain. In July of this year I had to have a bone spur removed that was growing through my Achilles. My (VA) surgeon said that it’s a common side effect to the ankle reconstruction I had done. Almost 25 years later and I’m still dealing with problems stemming from that decision not to fix things the first time.
This was my first procedure by the VA. My surgeon was a private practice guy from Seattle that came to the VA to get more surgeries under his belt. I feel lucky in that regard. I’ve dealt with the bad side of the VA (almost 2 month wait to get an MRI, a year and a half wait to get an ENT consult), but I have to say the physical therapy outfit at the VA is amazing. There’s a lot of underfunded stuff at the VA, but PT isn’t one of them. It’s really not something you could privatize easily. The civilian world just doesn’t see the injuries that the VA does, and the few that do definitely don’t see them in that volume. Losing access to that kind of care is just going to drive up an already horrific suicide rate, because guys are going to suffer.