I'm Shannon, married to Scott, and he was in the US Army.
We got together just after he got out of basic training.
His mother and my mom came in and they were both crying, and
immediately my mom said, he's OK, but.
And they had told us that there was a blast that knocked
out communication.
We won't know anything, but they do know that he's OK.
He called, and they got me on the phone with him, and he was
like, I'm OK.
Later, we found out that he had actually broke his spine,
but we didn't know at that time, and it didn't appear to
be a serious injury.
It was March when the injury happened, and he came home
from mid-tour, I think, in November.
He would have a lot of nightmares, a lot of restless
sleep where he just would sleep for a few minutes and be
fine for the next day.
Or he would stay up til 4 o'clock in the morning,
watching the news, slightly paranoid.
The drastic changes were very noticeable.
Like he couldn't remember where he was when he went to
get a cup of coffee in the morning.
Or if you was going down to the store, he would call me
halfway there and say, baby, what was I going there for?
He has very, very short patience,
very, very short fuse.
Where usually he would be a happy-go-lucky guy that didn't
really say too much, now he can get very angry at things
that you would never think a person would be mad about it.
He was passing out.
He would have lapses where he would just fall asleep in the
chair, and I can't wake him up.
So there was probably four times that he had this
seizure, and whatever happened, it knocked him out
to the point where they could barely find a pulse.
They hospitalized him immediately after it happened.
I think the third time they kept him for a two-week thing
where they started running tests and determined that he
had hearing loss.
He's got traumatic brain injury.
There's been over nine concussions.
At first, he was reluctant to go, because he was afraid that
the chain of command would come down on him for going and
getting help, or that people would look
at him bad in general.
Scott was having a very, very bad meltdown of severe
depression.
He was--
we had just gone through the loss of two of his
grandmothers back-to-back, and then my stepfather, as well.
And between that and the stress of having children that
you feel like you can't take care of and can't afford, one
night he looked at me, and very seriously looked up from
his video game and said, you know, you guys would be better
off if I just died.
And I said, no, we wouldn't.
There's not an amount of money that you could put on your
life that would make it a value equal to anything that
people could give us.
I immediately began to cry I was
panicking, to say the least.
I asked my mom.
I was like, what do I do?
And she said go online and look, and I started looking.
So when I called the VA's hotline, the man stayed on the
phone with me the whole time.
He got on the phone with Scott.
They sent police out, and one of the officers happened to be
a soldier, or a former soldier.
And he walked in and started talking to Scott, and the
first thing he said was, I feel the same way, man.
Let's go talk about it.
And he reached out his hand.
And when he reached out his hand, Scott put down the
remote to his game, and he walked out the door with him,
went and got in the ambulance on his own,
went to the VA hospital.
And I mean, it was absolutely that simple, just asking for
help, and saying, please, please help us.
Most of the help that they have done is really letting
him know that he's not worthless, he's injured.
In fact, he should be proud and thankful that he's still
alive to say that he got hurt.
And the VA has restored his confidence in himself by
telling him and showing him what he can and cannot do.
And knowing what you can't do makes what you can do that
much easier as well.
I would say the worst thing you can do is to be silent.
Silent problems are always the worst, because they're not out
in the open.
They're not spoken about.
They're not educated on.
They're not fixed.
I would say call your VA and talk to the counselors.
That's what they're there for.
Find out how quickly you can get an appointment, because
they're there to help, and they want to help,
and they do you help.