You Shouldn't Have To Present Your Purple Heart To Be Issued A Garment To Wear In The Hospital.

[dr_pretentious]

Especially not if the last clothes you wore got burnt or blasted off you by a roadside bomb, or cut off your body by a medic, several thousand miles away.

The Washington Post has been demonstrating the necessity of a free press and the value of real investigative journalism. If I thought my own experiences at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center were bad--well, actually, they were appalling by any standard--I have to say, they were small potatoes compared to what's happening routinely there now.

Now that large numbers of returning wounded soldiers are being treated to the...I can't even use the word "care" to describe it...that Walter Reed has to offer, and those soldiers' family members are there to see what's happening to them, and the Post is making the issue impossible to ignore, something might actually change.

The Post has so many articles that touch on the state of Walter Reed, I ended up spending a couple of hours picking through them all to find the most important ones. Here they are. Their headlines are easy to find, but some of the sentences are too potent to lose to skimming:

"You saved me, for what?"

"If Iraq doesn't kill you, Walter Reed will."

"It's not every day one gets to witness a whitewash in action."

The New York Times condensed one of the cases described at length in the Post this way:

A staff sergeant who had his eye and skull shattered in Iraq stumbled about after his release from a surgical recovery room. He was handed a map and ordered to find his way across the sprawling post to the outpatient unit. After he found his room he sat for weeks like some accidental tourist, with no doctor appointments nor official concern. “Shouldn’t they contact me?” he wondered.

That's in this editorial:

"When the Senate next debates whether to debate the Iraq war, members would do well to visit Walter Reed Army Medical Center, just five miles to the north."

Please consider calling your elected representatives with whatever opinion you form. As some of the patients' family members quoted in the Post articles note, pressure from Congresspeople and Senators actually gets good things to happen, even in the ghastly limbo of Walter Reed.

Comments

[sligoe.livejournal.com]

What can we do, now, in addition to calling our representatives? Can we volunteer? Can we render assistance for things like getting these men to their appointnments, helping their families, cleaning and repairing the buildings? Can't we, as pagans (and especially as BLue Star) get involved---put our money where our mouths are, so to speak? We want the war to end---for these people, the war in Iraq2 is over, but the war here at home has just begun. They deserve better.

What can we do? Let's figure this out and then go to help. It's the right thing to do.

[citabria]

I only got through 2 pages of the first link, and I'm too pissed off to read more.

Is it pathetic that as angry as I am, I'm not surprised? I've heard before that this administration is doing nothing to take care of the soldiers who are sent home wounded, and this is simply proof of it.

I'm glad that it's finally making the papers. Maybe this will be enough to make something good happen. Finally.

[siobhra.livejournal.com]

Oh, but think of all the money they are saving. /sarcasm.

This is where they cut funds when Congress cuts military funding. And it is under both parties. It shows up more in time of war.

60 min, the TV show once did something on doctors who could not get malpractice insurance. Without the insurance they could not practice so they went into the service in place's like Walter Reed. They can't be sued in there so they did not need to be insurable.

[skyefyr.livejournal.com]

This is disgusting. I had no idea....

Next time someone speaks in favor of the war around me, I'll point them here.

Thanks for sharing such important information.

[kistha.livejournal.com]

If you do this as a coven, I would send funds.

Will also write my reps.

*sigh*

[happy-dr-friend.livejournal.com]

In other fun "watch the Bush administration support the troops" news, Bush is also cutting funding to the VA system. This is particularly annoying because under Clinton the VA was actually getting halfway towards good. Initiatives such as computerizing the system (with an interface that could be understood and used even by an intern who had been awake for 140 of the last 168 hours), data sharing between VAs, committees to look into how to decrease the number of medical errors that occur rather than just blaming the person who happened to make the same mistake that everyone else has made N times this time, etc. were starting to make the VA a place where people wanted to come for medical care. Then Bush cut funding and, frankly, it's all going to hell. Without so much as a handbasket to put it in. They've also made a rule that doctors in the VA system can not access records from the military system. So, for example, a neurosurgeon facing a vet with a history of head trauma and a new neurological symptom, has no idea what exactly the trauma was or what has been done to try to correct it. (Fume.) Supporting the troops my butt.