Last night, a friend and fellow Army wife had sent me a text saying something had reminded her of a situation when we were both still back in Germany.
About two years ago, while my husband was in Afghanistan, I was receiving treatment for my back injury. The doctor decided to do some shots into my back, well one of them he managed to nick my spinal cord. This resulted in a very early morning trip to ER at Landstuhl, to do a blood patch since the nick hadn't 'healed' itself and my spinal fluid was draining into my back. Two ladies from my church went to the hospital with me, one being this Army wife friend of mine and the other was a pediatrician. My friend was driving my car and was used to driving a manual, so at one light she had stomped on the brakes thinking it was the clutch. This was the shared memory that had come back to both of us, but then she shared something with me that she hadn't before...
The doctor had gone back with me for the procedure, while my friend stayed in the waiting room.
Shortly after we had gone back, some buses pulled up in front of the ER. She hadn't thought much about it until she started seeing some of the service members walking in. The buses were the medical buses that pick up the soldiers that had been MEDEVAC'd back from downrange. So far, her experience as an Army wife hadn't involved a deployment and although she understood what wounded warrior and wounded in action (WIA) was, this was the first time she had seen it firsthand.
As she watched the stretchers come in and the medical personnel surround some of the patients, she saw some of the injuries and the numbers of soldiers that had come back just on this one flight. In her words to me last night, ' As they filed in around me in the waiting room, my heart stopped. I had never experienced anything like that feeling in my entire life... From that moment on, a soldier means many more things to me. I felt sick to my stomach, I couldn't breathe.' Apparently the look on her face said it all, because one of the injured soldiers leaned in and asked her if she was alright.
When she was telling me about this last night and how she can still remember it like it was yesterday and how it forever changed her life and what a few small words, Wounded Warrior or WIA, on a piece of paper truly mean. The sacrifice that's given besides just the understanding of times of separation and missed holidays and birthdays, how there is so much more given, often for a population that doesn't ever fully understand or see it firsthand. You see, even with being an Army wife, she had still been sheltered from much of this until that day.
Her husband recently returned from Afghanistan from his first deployment. Their unit lost several soldiers and she has noticed a significant change in him, as there is in many soldiers after they return home. Although, she will probably never understand what he had seen or been through while deployed, that day she received a glimpse into a world that even those associated with the military often don't see.
No comments:
Post a Comment