My husband serves in the National Guard. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005. While there, he severely injured his ankle. Although minor by some comparisons, the injury has hindered his ability to do day to day medial tasks. He can not stand on his feet for any length of time, climb stairs and the worst part…..he can not run and play with our 4 children. He struggles every day with the constant pain in his foot and it breaks my heart to see him try to cope with it. He has to manage pain to even drive to work (right ankle in case you are wondering why).

He had a stabalization surgery and was out of work for two months to recover. Yet he was only given 1 month of disability. He has appealed and they have denied the second month of pay. His employer does not provide disability insurance and for our family, 1 month of pay loss is a huge impact. We have struggled since. He was granted a monthly disability amount of 10% (really? Let's not strain our governmental wallet). He still serves in the Guard (as he has for 11 years) and has yet to be granted a permanent medical profile. Although his injury occurred 3 years ago, as recently as July (while doing pre-deployment paperwork) they informed him that they had no documentation that his injury was even service related (good thing he keeps a copy of EVERYTHING).

Going to the VA: Well that's a whole other story. It took a year before they were able to determine what the problem was and perform surgery. Since then it has been constant appointments and excuses. It took two months to get the results of the latest MRI and that was only after constant phone calls and a drive to the local VA Hospital. Now they want to fuse the ankle entirely. He isn't even 30 and rather than spending the time to explore other options they want to remove his range of motion completely. There is no concern for the long term affects, and it seems to be just another attempt to get him out of the ever flowing assembly line of patients.