thedrifter
03-19-06, 08:42 AM
Spouses of the wounded pull together for support
Jay Price, Staff Writer
For members of Camp Lejeune's newest support group, it was a phone call, not the dreaded knock at the door, that upended their lives.
"Honey, I've got some news," said Sgt. Karl Klepper, 32, calling from Iraq.
"OK," said his wife, Becky, shaking off an afternoon nap.
"I won one of those damn medals," he said.
A Purple Heart.
He didn't tell her that doctors had already shoved a protruding bone back into his left leg. Or how the bomb had flipped his Humvee atop him in the canal, pinning his ankle, or how he could barely contort his body enough to raise his head above water to breathe.
And he didn't tell her -- because he couldn't have known -- how his wound would change her life. There are elaborate support groups for the families of deployed soldiers, but there was no such network for the spouses of wounded troops.
Now there is.
Becky Klepper and two other wives of injured Marines, Shannon Maxwell and Alison Sturla, have started the Wounded Warrior Spouses' Support Group. It's a little more than a month old and so far has a handful of members. But the potential for growth is huge. The Marines are the smallest service branch, but about 5,500 have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The group held its second meeting Wednesday, opening with a presentation from a Navy psychologist on post-traumatic stress disorder and then moving into a closed session for the spouses.
The three organizers hope the concept will spread to the rest of the military. They have already fielded calls from spouses with West Coast Marine units.
"When your spouse is first injured," Klepper said, "you're inundated with information, and we want to help them process that information and be a resource if they have questions or need advice."
Early on, Maxwell said, "You eat, sleep and dream their care."
Somehow, the spouses have to learn such skills as how to navigate the military's medical bureaucracy, how to deal with the board that determines whether their Marine can stay in uniform, how to recognize post-traumatic stress disorder, how to cope with being the family's sole driver, with delivering their wounded Marine to his or her job on the Marine schedule -- say, 5 a.m. -- while riding herd on kids living by the civilian clock.
"Your roles change, sometimes briefly, sometimes permanently," Maxwell said. "Now the main provider is having to be taken care of, and that can be difficult. Children have to get used to the idea that maybe Daddy can't play like he used to."
A big problem is simply learning how to deal with the stress.
"I knew I wasn't the only one going through the emotions I was going through," Klepper said. "The losses you feel for things like the role you used to have -- you're no longer being taken care of, but you are now in the role of being a caregiver. The stresses no one else can understand unless they have been in your shoes."
Katherine Ellsworth, whose husband injured his ankle in Iraq in a helicopter accident, said it wouldn't have been right to turn to her normal confidantes, spouses of men in her husband's unit. When your husband is deployed, she said, you have to believe that no harm can come to him. Sharing her problems would destroy the other wives' defenses.
"You can't really talk about it to your civilian friends, and you can't really talk to the other wives from unit, whose husbands are still there," she said. "So there's really nobody left except wives who are going through the same thing."
Involving kin in care
Maxwell began to get a sense of her new life when her husband, Lt. Col. Tim Maxwell, was recuperating at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
A mortar shell had landed outside his tent while he slept in a western Iraq camp in October 2004. Shrapnel pierced his skull, tore into his jaw and broke his left elbow. Doctors in Baghdad removed a section of his skull temporarily to create an outlet for the pressure as the injury swelled his brain. Then they cut into his abdomen and placed the parts of his skull there to keep them alive until they could be reattached.
She flew to Germany to meet him at a military hospital, and within a day they flew back to Bethesda for more surgery.
There, the staff quickly involved her and other relatives in his care so they would have a good sense of his medication's schedule and side effects. She was allowed to live in his room, and, along with his mother and a sister, helped him eat, wash and go to the bathroom.
Back home, she had to drive him to endless rounds of therapy. Most of that is over now. Maxwell, a former triathlete, is able to run again and lift weights. He still occasionally sees a speech therapist, though, and gets mentally fatigued easily.
From the first, though, he has been determined to do what it takes to stay in the Marines. So have the other Marines whose spouses are in the support group.
Sometimes, relatives tell the spouses that the wounded Marines should leave the service. "You get a lot of comments like, 'He's done his job, he's served his country, now it's time to get out,' " Maxwell said.
There are no comments like that at the support group's meetings.
Last week, Lt. Kevin Park, the psychologist who spoke on post-traumatic stress disorder, told the group that a crucial part of treatment is giving patients a safe environment to talk candidly about what they're thinking and feeling.
"Do they have post-traumatic wife stress?" Brandee Mortimer asked jokingly.
"The people who help also have to be helped," Park said.
Anyone can come to the presentations on practical issues that begin the meetings, but then everyone leaves except the spouses of wounded Marines. In these closed sessions, they sometimes talk through problems and share advice.
"We talk about a lot of emotional issues," Maxwell said, "the guys' feelings, our feelings, what's going on, how the children are doing, how to reconstruct the family, basically."
Sometimes the topics themselves aren't what matter most.
"Just to be able to sit with people who know what I'm going through, sometimes just being able to sit in their presence is enough," Klepper said.
Staff writer Jay Price can be reached at 829-4526 or jprice@newsobserver.com.
Ellie
Jay Price, Staff Writer
For members of Camp Lejeune's newest support group, it was a phone call, not the dreaded knock at the door, that upended their lives.
"Honey, I've got some news," said Sgt. Karl Klepper, 32, calling from Iraq.
"OK," said his wife, Becky, shaking off an afternoon nap.
"I won one of those damn medals," he said.
A Purple Heart.
He didn't tell her that doctors had already shoved a protruding bone back into his left leg. Or how the bomb had flipped his Humvee atop him in the canal, pinning his ankle, or how he could barely contort his body enough to raise his head above water to breathe.
And he didn't tell her -- because he couldn't have known -- how his wound would change her life. There are elaborate support groups for the families of deployed soldiers, but there was no such network for the spouses of wounded troops.
Now there is.
Becky Klepper and two other wives of injured Marines, Shannon Maxwell and Alison Sturla, have started the Wounded Warrior Spouses' Support Group. It's a little more than a month old and so far has a handful of members. But the potential for growth is huge. The Marines are the smallest service branch, but about 5,500 have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The group held its second meeting Wednesday, opening with a presentation from a Navy psychologist on post-traumatic stress disorder and then moving into a closed session for the spouses.
The three organizers hope the concept will spread to the rest of the military. They have already fielded calls from spouses with West Coast Marine units.
"When your spouse is first injured," Klepper said, "you're inundated with information, and we want to help them process that information and be a resource if they have questions or need advice."
Early on, Maxwell said, "You eat, sleep and dream their care."
Somehow, the spouses have to learn such skills as how to navigate the military's medical bureaucracy, how to deal with the board that determines whether their Marine can stay in uniform, how to recognize post-traumatic stress disorder, how to cope with being the family's sole driver, with delivering their wounded Marine to his or her job on the Marine schedule -- say, 5 a.m. -- while riding herd on kids living by the civilian clock.
"Your roles change, sometimes briefly, sometimes permanently," Maxwell said. "Now the main provider is having to be taken care of, and that can be difficult. Children have to get used to the idea that maybe Daddy can't play like he used to."
A big problem is simply learning how to deal with the stress.
"I knew I wasn't the only one going through the emotions I was going through," Klepper said. "The losses you feel for things like the role you used to have -- you're no longer being taken care of, but you are now in the role of being a caregiver. The stresses no one else can understand unless they have been in your shoes."
Katherine Ellsworth, whose husband injured his ankle in Iraq in a helicopter accident, said it wouldn't have been right to turn to her normal confidantes, spouses of men in her husband's unit. When your husband is deployed, she said, you have to believe that no harm can come to him. Sharing her problems would destroy the other wives' defenses.
"You can't really talk about it to your civilian friends, and you can't really talk to the other wives from unit, whose husbands are still there," she said. "So there's really nobody left except wives who are going through the same thing."
Involving kin in care
Maxwell began to get a sense of her new life when her husband, Lt. Col. Tim Maxwell, was recuperating at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
A mortar shell had landed outside his tent while he slept in a western Iraq camp in October 2004. Shrapnel pierced his skull, tore into his jaw and broke his left elbow. Doctors in Baghdad removed a section of his skull temporarily to create an outlet for the pressure as the injury swelled his brain. Then they cut into his abdomen and placed the parts of his skull there to keep them alive until they could be reattached.
She flew to Germany to meet him at a military hospital, and within a day they flew back to Bethesda for more surgery.
There, the staff quickly involved her and other relatives in his care so they would have a good sense of his medication's schedule and side effects. She was allowed to live in his room, and, along with his mother and a sister, helped him eat, wash and go to the bathroom.
Back home, she had to drive him to endless rounds of therapy. Most of that is over now. Maxwell, a former triathlete, is able to run again and lift weights. He still occasionally sees a speech therapist, though, and gets mentally fatigued easily.
From the first, though, he has been determined to do what it takes to stay in the Marines. So have the other Marines whose spouses are in the support group.
Sometimes, relatives tell the spouses that the wounded Marines should leave the service. "You get a lot of comments like, 'He's done his job, he's served his country, now it's time to get out,' " Maxwell said.
There are no comments like that at the support group's meetings.
Last week, Lt. Kevin Park, the psychologist who spoke on post-traumatic stress disorder, told the group that a crucial part of treatment is giving patients a safe environment to talk candidly about what they're thinking and feeling.
"Do they have post-traumatic wife stress?" Brandee Mortimer asked jokingly.
"The people who help also have to be helped," Park said.
Anyone can come to the presentations on practical issues that begin the meetings, but then everyone leaves except the spouses of wounded Marines. In these closed sessions, they sometimes talk through problems and share advice.
"We talk about a lot of emotional issues," Maxwell said, "the guys' feelings, our feelings, what's going on, how the children are doing, how to reconstruct the family, basically."
Sometimes the topics themselves aren't what matter most.
"Just to be able to sit with people who know what I'm going through, sometimes just being able to sit in their presence is enough," Klepper said.
Staff writer Jay Price can be reached at 829-4526 or jprice@newsobserver.com.
Ellie