Expectations

Expectations.  Right or wrong, I had expectations of how war might impact my family.  I was and naïve, having only a vague understanding of the horror of war, and its impact on the family.  

My husband was active duty before the war started, and at the start of the current conflicts was deployed to Eastern Europe, training a foreign military, in a relatively “safe” position.  While he was away I saw other service members coming back to where we were stationed, injured, but what appeared (in my mind) to be “okay”.  They were walking, talking, getting prosthetics, and seemed to be moving on with life quite well.  I expected that if such things happened to my husband, our family would do the same.  I imagined that if he were wounded, he would either be killed, or be like one of those I had seen, quietly moving on with life.

What I did not see was those who were coming back with injuries, that 20 years ago were not considered “survivable”.  I did not see those who were so severely wounded that they would require a lifetime of care.  I am sure that I heard about one, or two severe cases where the wounded were not expected to wake from a coma, but those seemed extremely distant and rare.

The first real combat deployment wasn’t bad.  In fact, it was relatively easy.  Where he was at, the enemy was ill-equipped and had little military training, so the threat was not that big.  Other than the routine hardship of his seventh deployment in a few years, it did not have a huge impact the family.  Our oldest child was born after he got home, and when she was two weeks old, he deployed again.

This time was different.  Losses were heavy and immediate.  On the inside of my front door, the command had asked us to tape up a neon green form, listing the numbers of friends or neighbors that the chaplain should call to sit with us in the event of a death notification.  We were told to have passports ready in case we needed to be at bedside in Germany.  It was all unsettling, but it seemed like there was a functioning process and a good support network in place in the event of injury. 

I was wrong.  So horribly wrong.

The day my husband was labeled “severely wounded”, every process, every plan, every support system seemed pointless.  I had no idea how we were going to survive it.  The type and combination of injuries he sustained hadn’t been seen before in Navy medicine (and only a handful of civilian doctors world-wide had seen it).  No one could give a prognosis, or even an accurate diagnosis.  We went head first into a whole new life.

It’s been a decade since that day.  We’ve worked hard to make a new life, to keep moving forward.  Treatment has advanced in the last ten years, and he’s had improvement in some areas.  I have adjusted to becoming a caregiver and learned that a life I didn’t expect is not necessarily a bad one, just different.  We’ve met a lot of inspiring and amazing people, both warriors and those who care for them. - Elizabeth S.