The New York Times, reacting to the news of an injured news anchorman, offers a relevant piece on polytrauma.
...To describe the maimed survivors of this ugly new war, a graceless new word, polytrauma, has entered the medical lexicon. Each soldier arriving at Tampa's Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center, inside the giant veterans hospital, brings a whole world of injury. The typical patient, Dr. Scott said, has head injuries, vision and hearing loss, nerve damage, multiple bone fractures, unhealed body wounds, infections and emotional or behavioral problems. Some have severed limbs or spinal cords.
"Two years ago we started seeing injured soldiers coming back of a different nature," recalled Dr. Scott, who is also the hospital's chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation. Then last spring, with a Congressional mandate, the Department of Veterans Affairs created the four new centers, formalizing changes that a few top veterans hospitals were already starting to make.
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The polytrauma centers themselves remain works in progress, sharing lessons with one another and with the major military hospitals by videophone, and pushing scientific inquiry into the myriad, often invisible effects of explosive blasts.
The Department of Veterans Affairs says it has not calculated the cost of establishing the centers, bolstering their staffs and treating patients so long and intensively. The Tampa hospital's director, Forest Farley Jr., said that here alone, it was "several millions of dollars."
Though the average stay in polytrauma centers is 40 days, many patients remain for months and some for more than a year. In the end, a few must go to nursing homes, but most go home, where they receive continued care at less-specialized veterans hospitals, with oversight from the centers. Some require round-the-clock home aides and therapists and costly equipment, paid for by the government on top of monthly disability payments. Even so, wives or parents often must give up their jobs.
For the worst off, the ongoing annual costs — largely hidden costs of this war — can easily be several hundred thousand dollars or more.
"We expect to follow these patients for the rest of their lives," Dr. Scott said. "But I have a great deal of concern about our country's long-term commitment to these individuals. Will the resources be there over time?"
The public is mostly isolated from the death and injury of the Bush War in Iraq. Perhaps the recent incident will create a greater awareness.
In any event it is long past time to bring the troops home in this ill-conceived, poorly executed war that was built on lies and unrealistic neocon dreams. Staying or leaving is not the black and white choice the leader suggests. Iraq will not totally descend into chaos if we leave - some suggest the risk to the US may actually drop. Staying will not produce a victory.
This information is wonderful to help those in the military who have suffered such a dastardly injury to their person. My own involvement with a TBI is that I suffered one from a car wreck in 1977 and the effects carry on, even today. I am wishing to find contact in, or near the state of Oklahoma so that I can GET HELP
Posted by: John B. Trotter | June 24, 2007 at 17:43