Today, it mattered

Today’s blog post is a special treat, a guest post from my long time friend JourneyLynn Hurst.  The first time I remember meeting her, we were in an Army exercise in Wisconsin in 2005, and I was evaluating a Combat Support Hospital’s emergency department.  JL was there, an Irish girl with a bit of a Missouri drawl, a sharp tongue, and the inability to control it.  I remember her charisma – she was the type of person people wanted to be near, and she told it like it was.  She had been a sailor before she was a soldier, and you could tell.  

A few years later, she and I served on a deployment with the same unit, she in northern Iraq and me in the west.  In early 2010, after she found out that I was flying 800 miles to a terrifying job interview near where she lived with her husband, teenage son, and twin baby boys, she opened up their home to me, and provided minivan service, pizza, cold beer, and most importantly, emotional support.  I got the job, which so far has been the adventure of a lifetime, and I have in no small part, this woman to thank for it.

She shares with us her thoughts from Iraq in 2008:  

Cap,

This is the story that sprang to mind when you asked for an entry. I sent this email to my folks on the May 23, 2008. We had been in country for 8 months and some change. I was tired, discouraged, angry. We'd hit the "mid-tour slump", where it seemed as if there were no end in sight, and had a few weeks straight out of Hades to boot – a mass casualty event with 22 patients in 10 minutes - the death of a soldier from another unit who had become a friend to several of us - a raid that turned into an ambush and left several good men dead.  We were forced to listen to the local insurgent group celebrating loudly in the streets of neighboring Tikrit while we formed a "wall of honor" and escorted their bodies to the waiting transport planes. Tempers were frayed, stamina and optimism were stretched to the breaking point - we didn't feel as though we were doing any good at all.  I took pride in being a medic.  It had been my calling since I was 19 and wet behind the ears. Now, at 33, I didn't even want to do it anymore. I didn't know anything for sure, except that I was counting down the days until I could get the hell out of that godforsaken country and never look back. Then this happened - it was one of the most significant moments, not only of my time in Iraq, but of my entire life.

Dear Folks:

Sometimes there are moments when you know you've done a good thing, made a difference. Tonight was one of them.

There is an Iraqi doctor we have had (we just call him "Doc" since nobody can pronounce his name) as a patient for several months now. He lives in a small village near here. Most of the doctors in the area were run off, kidnapped or killed during Saddam's regime and the ensuing power struggles, but Doc has stayed, running a clinic out of a small garage near his home.
This man EXEMPLIFIES commitment and courage. He stayed, even after numerous death threats to both himself and his family. Though supplies were hard to come by (that's how we first got to know him; begging daily at the front gate for "extra" things we could supply) and there were several attempts on his life, he continued to give "his" people the best care he could, even though his patients sometimes lived several days journey away and he had to travel through hostile territory to do so. He's "one brave sumbitch", as the infantry guys like to say.

A while ago, during a pretty bad day here, the bad guys finally caught up with him. We managed to save his life, but he was badly wounded, and lost both legs below the knee. We arranged medical care for him at a local hospital in the village but that's not much to write home about, so he's been back and forth at the CSH since then. Surgery after surgery, debridement (cleaning and scrubbing) of his wounds and being fitted for prosthetic limbs, along with weeks of physical therapy. Through it all, his only goal has been to get well enough to go BACK into the same village where they tried to kill him, to his home and clinic, and continue his work as a doctor.

He had a bout with depression that it took us a while to snap him out of, but we managed. One of our "transplant" docs (they rotate in every 90 days) wrote home and got a set of legs donated. They're kind of clunky and nowhere near the state of the art stuff that a soldier would have who's wounded, but he was thrilled to get them, and they'll do the job. Now that he's in a better mood, he's a pretty easygoing guy, with a nice smile and he's become kind of an unofficial mascot around here - we've all cheered him on during his therapy, and he's been a big help, taking the time to teach us a lot about Iraqi culture and to help other patients on the ward when they needed something and a translator wasn't available.

So, with all that said, I think you can understand why there wasn't a dry eye in the house tonight at dinner when Doc, surrounded by physical therapy staff and followed by a medic pushing an EMPTY wheelchair, walked on his OWN power, using his brand new legs into the dining hall for his first officially cleared "outing" since the injury. We got some strange looks from the "regular" soldiers around us, who didn't understand what the fuss was about, as we pushed back our trays, jumped up, cheered, clapped, stomped, yelled at the top of our lungs (Bruce even got up on the table) and then unashamedly wiped our streaming eyes as a REALLY quite embarrassed Doc sat at a table in the back.

Like I said, for every time I wonder if anything we've done here
makes a difference, this time I know it did. We did GOOD here and THIS is what our job is all about.  Just had to share.

Love, J

Journey currently lives in Colorado Springs with her husband, not quite grown-up son, and the twins, who are now past the terrible twos, but have decided to extend the reign of terror for another year.  She refers to them as the co-conspirators.  You may read about their exploits and others on her Blog, Have Minivan, Will Travel.