Veterans Harder Hit By Hep C

At The Crossroads, Part 6: Veterans Harder Hit By Hep C
Rhode Island NPR Radio
By KRISTIN GOURLAY
December 5, 2014

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) chairs the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs. At a hearing Wednesday, Dec. 3, Sanders wanted to know why new hepatitis C drugs cost so much and how the VA was going to pay for them.
Credit Screenshot of live stream of hearing

Dennis was a young Marine training at Camp Pendleton, ready to deploy.

“I was on my way over, I was in what they call staging,” said Dennis. “13, 16, 17 days, then send you over to Okinawa, then Vietnam. I got lucky.”

That is, if you call blowing a knee out lucky. It saved him from going to Vietnam. Soon after that, Dennis isn’t sure when or how, he got infected with the hepatitis C virus.

“I didn’t do any intravenous drugs or anything like that,” Dennis said. “My ex had it, I don’t know if I got it from her.”

Dennis is 63. He’s from Providence. He doesn’t want us to use his last name because of the stigma hepatitis C can carry. It’s a disease he’s been living with for decades. That’s partly because, until this year, his treatment options were pretty grim. But the years of hoping for something better to come along are over. Doctor Alexis Pappas gives Dennis the good news in an exam room at the Providence VA.

“So as you’ve probably heard in the news,” Pappas explained, “there’s a lot of new treatments for hepatitis c and the VA has all those available now for your genotype.”

Pappas tells Dennis she’ll start him on treatment right away. And chances are excellent that after 12 weeks he’ll be cured. But that cure comes at a price. One new hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, costs $84,000 dollars for a full course. The VA managed to negotiate that down to about $50,000 dollars.

But with more than 170,000 veterans living with hepatitis C, the price is still too high for strained budgets.

“So most of our veterans have been carrying disease for the past three, four decades,” said Promrat. “And now it’s the time when the full-blown manifestations of chronic liver injury come to light. And we’re now dealing with that, right now.”

Dealing, he says, with a ten-fold increase in the number of patients with liver cancer. Rising numbers of patients needing liver transplants. More veterans with cirrhosis and liver failure. All consequences of untreated hepatitis C.
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Gulf War Air Force Veteran Fights for Neglected Female Veterans

Female vets offer help to neglected comrades
Women give a voice to overlooked female troops
Gainesville Times
By Chelsey Abercrombie
POSTED: December 7, 2014

“A man walks around and he’s wearing a veteran’s hat and that’s OK,” she said. “But if a women does it, she’s just wanting attention.”

Teresa Lambert, of Women Veteran Social Justice, discusses veteran’s issues Wednesday morning in the studios of Decibel Radio at the University of North Georgia Gainesville campus.
By SCOTT ROGERS (The Times)

When Teresa Lambert graduated high school in 1988, she found herself on a more unique path than most of her fellow female classmates.

Lambert joined the U.S. Air Force at 17 and began a career in air transportation. In the overwhelmingly male-dominated field, she relished the challenge.

“It’s considered a man’s career field, so it was a perfect fit for me because I grew up as a tomboy and there was nothing a man could do that I couldn’t do,” Lambert said.

However, her life in the military was not idyllic. She faced several obstacles during her tenure in the Air Force.

But each obstacle she overcame led her to helping others through their own journeys as active service members and veterans.

Now, the University of North Georgia student serves as the Northeast Georgia ambassador for Women Veteran Social Justice, an organization that advocates for female veterans and their needs.

A big part of Lambert’s job is reaching out to female veterans via social media, as many of them are disabled and can’t leave their homes. WVSJ also connects female veterans with job skills training and counsels them on how to get the Veterans Administration benefits to which they are entitled.

But Lambert’s journey with the military started years earlier.

Lambert’s tale During the Michigan native’s military career, she oversaw air transportation of cargo. And she served in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.

But a decade of service in a physically demanding job took its toll. Her marriage to a civilian became embroiled in domestic abuse.

It was then Lambert discovered the military’s resources fell short of helping her cope.

“The Air Force’s way of handling (my husband’s abuse) was just to always send him back to the States, just basically to get rid of the problem,” said Lambert, who was stationed overseas at the time. “They got rid of him, but I didn’t get any of the support or the recognition from my command that I was in a domestically abusive marriage.”
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Louie Zamperini WWII Veteran "Unbroken"

If you have PTSD, then know this, you are not broken either. You changed the same way all men and women do in combat. Some just change more but that is because they feel things more. In other words, strong emotional core. It is never too late to get help to heal.

Unbroken Official Trailer #1 (2014) - Angelina Jolie Directed Movie HD
Unbroken Official Trailer #2 (2014) - Angelina Jolie Directed Movie HD

The Story of Unbroken
by Laura Hillenbrand
Eight years ago, an old man told me a story that took my breath away. His name was Louie Zamperini, and from the day I first spoke to him, his almost incomprehensibly dramatic life was my obsession.

It was a horse--the subject of my first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend--who led me to Louie. As I researched the Depression-era racehorse, I kept coming across stories about Louie, a 1930s track star who endured an amazing odyssey in World War II.

I knew only a little about him then, but I couldn’t shake him from my mind. After I finished Seabiscuit, I tracked Louie down, called him and asked about his life. For the next hour, he had me transfixed.

Growing up in California in the 1920s, Louie was a hellraiser, stealing everything edible that he could carry, staging elaborate pranks, getting in fistfights, and bedeviling the local police. But as a teenager, he emerged as one of the greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he put on a sensational performance, crossed paths with Hitler, and stole a German flag right off the Reich Chancellery. He was preparing for the 1940 Olympics, and closing in on the fabled four-minute mile, when World War II began. Louie joined the Army Air Corps, becoming a bombardier. Stationed on Oahu, he survived harrowing combat, including an epic air battle that ended when his plane crash-landed, some six hundred holes in its fuselage and half the crew seriously wounded.

On a May afternoon in 1943, Louie took off on a search mission for a lost plane. Somewhere over the Pacific, the engines on his bomber failed. The plane plummeted into the sea, leaving Louie and two other men stranded on a tiny raft. Drifting for weeks and thousands of miles, they endured starvation and desperate thirst, sharks that leapt aboard the raft, trying to drag them off, a machine-gun attack from a Japanese bomber, and a typhoon with waves some forty feet high. At last, they spotted an island. As they rowed toward it, unbeknownst to them, a Japanese military boat was lurking nearby. Louie’s journey had only just begun.

That first conversation with Louie was a pivot point in my life. Fascinated by his experiences, and the mystery of how a man could overcome so much, I began a seven-year journey through his story. I found it in diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs; in the memories of his family and friends, fellow Olympians, former American airmen and Japanese veterans; in forgotten papers in archives as far-flung as Oslo and Canberra. Along the way, there were staggering surprises, and Louie’s unlikely, inspiring story came alive for me. It is a tale of daring, defiance, persistence, ingenuity, and the ferocious will of a man who refused to be broken.

The culmination of my journey is my new book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. I hope you are as spellbound by Louie’s life as I am.

Husband Charged After Fort Bliss Soldier Found Dead

Fort Bliss soldier killed in North Central El Paso apartment, husband arrested
El Paso Times
By Aaron Martinez
POSTED: 12/05/2014

The Fort Bliss soldier found dead Thursday afternoon in a North Central El Paso apartment was slain, and her husband has been arrested, officials said.

Pfc. Christina Bukovcik, 20, was found Thursday about 3:45 p.m. at the High Vista Apartments, 5041 Alabama, after police were called to check on her.

Police would not say how she was killed. Bukovcik was a food service specialist at Fort Bliss, post officials said.

According to Bukovcik's Facebook page, she is from Norwalk, Conn.

Her husband, Geomel Shaffa, 22, was arrested in Arizona in connection with her death. Shaffa was a former soldier in the Army, a post official said. No further details on his time in the army were released.

The aggravated assault charge was in connection to an incident in which Shaffa allegedly threw his wife at the time, Mariza Shaffa, off a third-story balcony, according to the El Paso Times archives. Shaffa was arrested on Oct. 26, 2013, and released from El Paso County Jail in March 2014.
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Iraq veteran searched for help then faced off with police

Man arrested for alleged bizarre behavior has PTSD, mother says
LA Times
By TONY PERRY
December 6, 2014

A 33-year-old man whose alleged erratic, combative behavior led to his arrest in Rancho Santa Fe is an Army veteran of Iraq suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues, his mother told a San Diego television station.

"He's really not a criminal," Andrea Roper told KUSI-TV. "He's sick .... He needs help."

Roper said her son has sought treatment at the Veterans Affairs hospital and Naval Medical Center San Diego. But he has stopped going to therapy appointments and taking his medication, she said.

Harrington enlisted in the Army in 2001 at age 19, was trained as a medic, and served several tours in Iraq, his mother said. For five years he has sought care at the VA and has been hospitalized in the mental ward, she said.
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