Military docs give up too quickly on brain damaged vets
When Staff Sgt. Jarod Behee was asked to select a paint color for the customized wheelchair that was going to be his future, his young wife seethed. The government, Marissa Behee believed, was giving up on her husband just five months after he took a sniper's bullet to the head during his second tour of duty in Iraq. Ms. Behee, a sunny Californian who was just completing a degree in interior design, possessed a keen faith in her husband's potential to be rehabilitated from a severe brain injury. She refused to accept what she perceived to be the more limited expectations of the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. "The hospital continually told me that Jarod was not making adequate progress and that the next step was a nursing home," Ms. Behee said. "I just felt that it was unfair for them to throw in the towel on him. I said, 'We're out of here.' " Ms. Behee had successfully resisted the Army's efforts to retire her husband into the V.A. health care system and it turned out that his military insurance policy covered private care. So she moved him to a community rehabilitation center. Three months later, Sergeant Behee was walking unassisted and abandoned his government-provided wheelchair. Now 28, he works as a volunteer in the center's outpatient gym, wiping down equipment and handing out towels. It is not the police job that he aspired to; his cognitive impairments are serious. But it is not a nursing home, either.
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