I got a question from someone who had just finished reading one of my Kindle books. It reads in part “How did you get hurt and what is your disability?” People assume that my disability comes from my service in Vietnam. It does not! I survived Vietnam with no permanent physical injuries. Just prior to being sent to Vietnam I was at Fort Sill Oklahoma as part of a Pershing Missile outfit. I was hurt in a training accident. I don’t remember the accident itself because if you are rendered unconscious you don’t have any memory of the events just prior to being knocked out. We were running an obstacle course and it was our third time through. That’s about all I remember. I woke up next in the base hospital with doctors poking needles in my feet and asking me if I could feel them. I couldn’t and for a short bit of time, I was paralyzed from the waist down. At the time, it was deemed a “spinal bruise.” My friends told me I had fallen off what looked like a pile of logs that you had to climb over and through. I had been near the top or at the top depending on which friend was telling me the story and fell through the various supports holding up this pile of logs. There was the reason that it was called the backbreaker by us. I was soon posted to Vietnam and I forgot all about the accident. About 40 years later I began to experience problems I didn’t understand. My back would feel very tired and painful. Sometimes there felt like electric shocks going down the backs of my legs and they could be so strong that I would actually fall.
That’s the history of the injury. I believe that the electric shock feelings and my legs caused me to fall down a flight of stairs and my foot caught in a baluster snapping my ankle. Again, I am not sure because I remember being upstairs and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the kitchen floor at the bottom of the stairs. The orthopedic surgeon who was taking care of my broken ankle took an x-ray of my back after I complained to him about what was happening. He asked me if I had ever injured my back because it clearly showed up in the x-rays. It was only then that I remembered the accident at Fort Sill. I turned to the VA because I had lousy insurance at the time. They quickly took care of me once they retrieved my medical records from the Army. Here’s what I understand happened. If you hit your spine as hard as I did in the accident, your spine reacts by growing extra bone and pinching off the nerves that come out of the spine. It is called stenosis. It’s also a slow process. The VA first sent me to one of their hospitals in Omaha Nebraska. That surgery solved the problem of the electric shocks running down the back of my legs. It did not solve the other problems of pain. The VA then sent me to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota and I underwent three more operations there. The first operation ended after 16 hours because they were worried about keeping me under anesthesia and I am sure the surgeons were becoming fatigued as well. They had harvested one of my ribs to help strengthen one of the vertebrae. About a week later they went back and finished the operation by fusing the spine. They fused from L1 to S2. That fusion failed and they attempted to repair it in another operation, but it failed as well. In total, I spent 46 hours on the operating table. After the last operation, I said no more. I was done unless there was an absolute need for another one.
Today I am left with a number of “symptoms.” My left leg and foot functions very poorly. My right foot is partially paralyzed. Those two symptoms mean I don’t have a good sense of balance. It forced me to use a walker. However, when I stand I begin to lose full control of my legs – obviously pressure on some nerves – and thanks to physical therapy I know that means I cannot stand or walk for more than four minutes. So I use a walker for short distances and a wheelchair for longer ones plus an electric scooter to get around our yard. The parts of the spine that were fused regulate your bowel and bladder among other things. I did not lose bowel control, but I must use catheters for the other function. Intimacy is no longer possible because many of the nerves that control it are damaged. I could go on but I think you get the picture.
I hope I have answered everyone’s questions. My current condition is mostly the result of the fact that you cannot mess around with the nerves without creating more damage.
