Don’t keep that near-miss – or repeated - blast off your medical record

Have you ever been on a patrol where you took mortar or RPG fire, or maybe an IED-blast – but no shrapnel – and just continued mission like it was another day on the job?

What about time spent at the range or a shoot house with lots of high caliber rounds or other explosives detonating near you?

I did all of the above… and my first thoughts were, “it’s not that big of a deal. I don’t want to see the medics and leave my guys behind.” I never gave a second thought to go get these things noted in my medical record.

Pride and inexperience can be a dangerous thing for “future you.”

It turns out that our brains don’t forget as many things as we seem to [citation: https://rly.pt/ScienceDirect].

I’ve been out of the military for a while now and I deal with sleep and other issues that may have come from these past incidents.

If this sounds similar to your experiences, some other symptoms you may want to look for include unexplained vision, balance, hearing, headaches, memory issues, emotional challenges, or incidents losing your temper with your team, family, or friends.

If you are still actively serving in the military, make sure you raise your concerns to your doctor and mention the concussive events so they are documented in your medical records. If you don’t want to bring it up now because you are not sure if you really have these symptoms and don’t want it to keep you from your next promotion, I get it. Just make sure you have these issues documented the moment you drop your papers to end your military service.

That single piece of documentation – made while you are still serving – will be key for the VA to determine benefits and treatment available to you later in life.

If you, like me, are already out of service, and you didn’t have anything documented and are looking for a path forward, then go talk to your doctor. If your doc is not at the VA, consider getting VA care as their docs see a lot more brain trauma patients than most of their civilian counterparts: https://rly.pt/VAapply.

Also, for many reasons (see my last post here: https://rly.pt/ReactToContact), stay in touch with those who served with you. It can be their eyewitness accounts of things you experienced together that can help you if you don’t have the things I mentioned above documented to get the benefits you have earned.