Showing posts with label Brooke Army Medical Center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brooke Army Medical Center. Show all posts

Friday, April 17, 2009

2 wounded soldiers die mysteriously at Brooke Army Medical Center

2 wounded GIs die mysteriously at BAMC

By Sig Christenson - Express-News
The Army is investigating the deaths of two soldiers who were recovering from wounds at Brooke Army Medical Center, one of them a survivor of a car bomb blast in Baghdad.

Chief Warrant Officer 1 Judson Erik Mount and Spc. Craig Reginald Hamilton died April 7 and March 27, respectively, prompting criminal intelligence division investigations and autopsies, the Army said Thursday.

Both GIs were recovering in an Army warrior transition battalion, a system designed to improve medical care for wounded soldiers. Deaths in those units, however, prompted the Army's surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, to tell the House Armed Services Committee last year that “we're seeing a pattern” of overdoses and suicides.

Hamilton, 35, of Milford, N.H., had been injured at Fort Sill, Okla., while Mount, a 37-year-old former San Antonio resident, suffered extensive wounds in a blast near a market that killed Staff Sgt. Timothy H. Walker.

“Jud kept seeing Timmy's eyes staring at him. He kept having the flashbacks every night,” said his mother, Joyce Mount of Franklin, Tenn.

Just what happened to Hamilton and Mount isn't clear, and their deaths have not been explained. BAMC and Defense Department did not give information about either man prior to a San Antonio Express-News inquiry, and declined to elaborate when asked for details, citing ongoing probes.

One issue arising from deaths like these is the mixing of medications. At least three soldiers may have died of drug interactions nationwide, one of them Sgt. Robert Nichols, 31, at Fort Sam.
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2 wounded GIs die mysteriously at BAMC

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Veterans Turn To Online Strangers For Financial Help

If you've been paying attention, a report like this will not surprise you. The problem is, most people, well, they haven't paid attention at all. This is what happens when the government does not think "have they done enough" instead of just doing what they are forced to do.

Veterans Turn To Online Strangers For Financial Help
NPR - USA
by Daniel Zwerdling
Listen Now

Morning Edition, January 22, 2009 · When Robert Sprenger's Humvee blew up in Iraq, the Army specialist was burned black over large swatches of his body.

After the Army transported him to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, Sprenger spent months lying in his bed, wrapped in gauze, almost like a mummy.

When he was released, he moved back home with his mother to the farm town of Sleepy Eye, Minn., where they made a troubling discovery.

The government compensated him, but his mother says the money wasn't anywhere near enough to cover his family's expenses. So Sprenger and his family swallowed their pride, as a growing number of veterans have done, and went cyberbegging: They posted their story on a Web site and asked strangers to help.

"That was the most horrible-est thing," says Robert's mother, Vicky Sprenger. But she says they had no choice. "I wouldn't ever cut the Army down for any reason whatsoever," she says. "I just think ... it kind of stinks, you know, that we do have to struggle the way we do."

“If the VA is meeting [its] obligations to America's veterans, why is there a need for any other nongovernmental organizations or veterans service organizations to provide any level of assistance?”
Peter Gaytan, director of national veterans affairs, the American Legion

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

T. Boone Pickens donating money from his book to help wounded troops



I was watching the Daily Show last night and T. Boone Pickens was talking about his new book. The great thing was he also announced that the money from the book, is going to Brooke Army Medical Center and Fisher House! This is a great thing.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=210176&title=t.-boone-pickens

The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future (Hardcover)
by T. Boone Pickens (Author)

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Three months after bomb blast Sgt. Steve A. McCoy succumbs

Georgia soldier wounded in Iraq dies in Texas

The Associated Press - The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Jun 13, 2008 21:18:03 EDT

SAN ANTONIO — A Georgia soldier died Tuesday at a military hospital in San Antonio of wounds suffered nearly three months ago in Iraq.

The Defense Department on Friday announced the death of 23-year-old Sgt. Steve A. McCoy of Moultrie, Ga.

The Pentagon says McCoy died Tuesday at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio of wounds suffered during a March 23 vehicle bombing in Baghdad.

He was assigned to 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, at Fort Stewart, Ga.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/06/ap_militarydeath_061308/

Friday, June 6, 2008

Center’s focus: Mental health issues, severe brain injuries

Center’s focus: Mental health issues, severe brain injuries
By Jeffrey Schogol, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Saturday, June 07, 2008


BETHESDA, Md. — Defense leaders feel a "debt and a need and a requirement" to address the stresses troop feel from combat and what happens afterward, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday,

"Combat changes people," said Marine Gen. James Cartwright said. "It changes the members of the service. It changes their families. It changes the communities they live in. And we have to acknowledge those changes. We have to address those changes."

Cartwright spoke Thursday at the groundbreaking for a new center to treat brain injuries and psychological wounds. The move is "overdue," he said.

"It is something that men and women in uniform deserve, not only from the current conflict, but from past conflicts," Cartwright said.

The National Intrepid Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury is slated to be completed in late 2009, according to a news release for Thursday’s event.

Money for the center is being raised by the Intrepid Fallen Heroes fund, a private charity that previously raised $60 million to build the Center for the Intrepid, a rehabilitation facility for amputees and burn victims at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, the news release said.
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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=55362

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

How does the body regrow? Pixie Dust and stem cells

Salamander-inspired therapy may aid injured vets
Story Highlights
"Regenerative medicine" pursued by the Pentagon, top U.S. and medical facilities

Key to regeneration is powder nicknamed "pixie dust"

Powder forms a microscopic "scaffold" that helps cells grow into desired tissue


By Larry Shaughnessy
CNN Pentagon Producer

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (CNN) -- Last week in an operating room in Texas, a wounded American soldier underwent a history-making procedure that could help him regrow the finger that was lost to a bomb attack in Baghdad, Iraq, last year.


Army Sgt. Shiloh Harris' doctors applied specially formulated powder to what's left of the finger in an effort to do for wounded soldiers what salamanders can do naturally: replace missing body parts.

If it sounds like science fiction, the lead surgeon agreed.

"It is. But science fiction eventually becomes true, doesn't it?" asked Dr. Steven Wolf of Brooke Army Medical Center.

Harris' surgery is part of a major medical study of "regenerative medicine" being pursued by the Pentagon and several of the nation's top medical facilities, including the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic. Nearly $250 million has been dedicated to the research.

Air Force Tech. Sgt. Israel Del Toro is one of the wounded vets who might one day benefit from this research. He was injured by a bomb in Afghanistan. Both his hands were badly burned. On his left hand, what was left of his fingers fused together.

"You know, in the beginning, when I first got hurt, I told them, just cut it off. So I can get some function," Del Toro said. His doctors did not cut off his injured left arm. And since that injury, advancements in burn and amputation treatment mean he may one day be able to use his fingers again. Watch more on regenerative medicine »

A key to the research dedicated to regrowing fingers and other body parts is a powder, nicknamed "pixie dust" by some of the people at Brooke. It's made from tissue extracted from pigs.

The pixie dust powder itself doesn't regrow the missing tissue; it tricks the patient's body into doing that itself.

All bodies have stem cells. As we are developing in our mothers' wombs, those stem cells grow our fingers, toes, organs -- essentially, our whole body. The stem cells stop doing that around birth, but they don't go away. The researchers believe that the "pixie dust" can put those stem cells back to work growing new body parts.
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/05/26/regrowing.body.parts/index.html

Friday, May 2, 2008

Marine Sgt. Merlin German dies of burns from 2005

`Miracle' Marine dies; badly burned in 2005 Iraq blast

`Miracle' Marine badly burned in 2005 Iraq blast dies after becoming emblem of resolve

The Associated Press
AP News

May 02, 2008 07:37 EST

A Marine sergeant who became a symbol of resilience as he strove to recover from a roadside bomb blast in Iraq that blanketed 97 percent of his body with burns has died, the Defense Department said. He was 22.


Sgt. Merlin German died April 11 at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where he was continuing treatment for the injuries he suffered in combat on Feb. 22, 2005, the Pentagon said Thursday.

The former turret gunner was dubbed the "Miracle Man" for his determination in facing his wounds, which cost the former saxophone player his fingers and rippled his face with scars. He endured more than 40 surgeries, spent 17 months in a hospital and had to learn to walk again.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Operation Homefront comes through for Johnson Family

Army couple finds help after pain of Iraq, deaths of their 3 children
09:23 PM CST on Thursday, January 3, 2008
By DAVID McLEMORE / The Dallas Morning News
dmclemore@dallasnews.com

CIBOLO, Texas – In near-freezing temperatures Thursday, Spc. Austin Johnson and his wife, Lisa, cut through a yellow ribbon stretched across the porch of their new home and walked in to a house full of furniture.

The move into the new home – their first house since the couple married right out of high school – is bittersweet for the Johnsons.

Last August, Spc. Johnson, 27, received a traumatic brain injury from an improvised explosive device blast in Iraq, his fifth explosion in two tours.

Tragedy struck again in October, not long after he began rehabilitation at Brooke Army Medical Center. Their three children were killed after Mrs. Johnson's car was overturned by heavy winds in West Texas as she drove from El Paso to be with her husband.

"There are a lot of Johnsons out there," said Amy Palmer, co-founder of Operation Homefront, the nonprofit group that called on local businesses and dozens of donors to help the Johnsons.

More than 30,000 troops have been wounded in six years of war; and as many as 100,000 may experience post-traumatic stress disorder.Officials with Operation Homefront hope Thursday's event serves as a model to help other wounded service members whose lives have been disrupted by war.
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