E03: Critical Reading – scarletthief

“Caleb has been home since 2006, way more than enough time for Brannan to catch his symptoms.”

• The word “catch” signifies that Brannan was infected by Caleb, but when catch is usually used in this context, the form of infection is usually due to bacteria, viruses, fungi, and/or parasites from the infected.
• The article was published in 2013, so the author is stating that in 7 years “catching” PTSD is definite when 7 years is “way more than enough time for Brannan to catch his symptoms.”

“This PTSD picture is worse than some, but much better, Brannan knows, than those that have devolved into drug addiction and rehab stints and relapses.”

• How does Brannan know how her situation compares to other wives’ and families’ situations? And how many have “devolved into drug addiction and rehab stints and relapses?” The number of veterans who have “devolved” into situations that Brannan claims are worse than her family’s is not mentioned, so we are left wondering if there is a large number of these veterans, or a small number.

“She has not, unlike military wives she advises, ever been beat up.Nor jumped out of her own bed when she got touched in the middle of the night for fear of being raped, again. Still.”

• Brannan claims that all the military wives she has advised have been beat up and raped by their husbands who suffer from PTSD.

“Trauma is a contagious disease; it affects everyone that has close contact with a traumatized person” in some form or another, to varying degrees and for different lengths of time.

• Definition claim: “Trauma is a contagious disease.”

“She sleeps a maximum of five hours a night, keeps herself going with fast food and energy drinks, gets Katie to and from school and to tap dance and art, where Katie produces some startlingly impressive canvases, bright swirling shapes bisected by and intersected with other swaths of color, bold, intricate. That’s typical parent stuff, but Brannan also keeps Caleb on his regimen of 12 pills—antidepressants, anti-anxiety, sleep aids, pain meds, nerve meds, stomach meds—plus weekly therapy, and sometimes weekly physical therapy for a cartilage-lacking knee and the several disintegrating disks in his spine, products of the degenerative joint disease lots of guys are coming back with maybe from enduring all the bomb blasts, and speech therapy for the TBI, and continuing tests for a cyst in his chest and his 48-percent-functional lungs.”

• Brannan has only slept for at most 5 hours for reasons unexplained. Nightmares? Screams from her husband? Screams from her daughter, Katie? We are not informed.
• Her daughter is surprisingly a very good 6 year old artist who paints with many colors and creates detailed and complicated designs. As 6 years old.
• Sleeping a maximum of 5 hours per night, eating fast food, drinking energy drinks, and driving her child to her activities is what the “typical” parent does.
• Caleb has 12 pills he must take regularly for depression, anxiety, insomnia, and pain.
• He attends therapy and sometimes physical therapy once a week due to his time serving in the infantry.
• Who and how many are the “lots of guys” coming back with the degenerative joint disease that Caleb has? Are they infantry like Caleb? Navy or Airforce? Are the “lots of guys” only the ones who have been in the front lines fighting or including the other veterans who have been stationed to aid rather than fight?
• Caleb’s lungs are only about half functioning which makes doing many activities very difficult, especially yelling (which he does frequently, as mentioned in the article numerous times) and physical activities very demanding on his body.

She also works for the VA now, essentially, having been—after a good deal more complicated paperwork, visits, and assessments—enrolled in its new caregiver program, which can pay spouses or other family members of disabled vets who have to take care of them full time, in Brannan’s case $400 a week.

• “Which can” makes me think that the caregiver program “can” also not pay the spouses. The author should just write “which pays” and remove the “can” because it is almost as if it can aid family members in other ways and not pay them.
• “In Brannan’s case $400 a week” – Brannan is paid $400 a week because that is the how much she needs to care for her veteran husband who is a recluse at home and in need of medication and medical care. Another worker for the VA could be paid a different amount a week depending on their situation.

“It may take years for the verdict to come in on whether secondary trauma will be officially acknowledged as its own unique form of hell. Meanwhile, Hofstra professor Motta says, while “a simple Google search [of the research] would tell you that the children of traumatized people have problems, the VA doesn’t wanna spend the money. Even with veterans, they try to say, ‘Well, you really had a preexisting condition.’ It would cost millions upon millions to treat the people affected. They just don’t want to foot the bill.”

• The VA doesn’t want to spend money to help in the aid of veterans or their families, and specifically for the veterans they say the veteran had a problem before serving so their trauma was not due to their time serving.

“Lost wages. Nonprofit assistance, outreach, social services. There are an estimated 100,000 homeless vets on the street on any given night.”

• There are around 100,000 homeless veterans due to not getting aid (financial or otherwise).

“When Caleb checked into his VA inpatient therapy in 2010, more than two-thirds of his fellow patients were veterans of Vietnam.”

• The number of “fellow patients” is not mentioned. More than 2/3 is easily achieved with 3 out 4 patients being veterans of Vietnam. There may also be 21 out of 30 patients being veterans of Vietnam since 21/30 is more than 2/3.