Overcoming Adversity: A Veteran's Journey

PTSD MS TBI

Hello, boys and girls. Call me Mr. Medicated. How you doing? I am a disabled vet. I have been disabled now for 12 years. Totally and completely disabled, I guess. But, unfortunately, I was suffering from this disability for like 30 years. Nobody told me.

So, anyway, I have PTSD, multiple sclerosis, and a severe brain injury, combat-related. So, I want to go over my issues, my problems, things that happened with me with you, so maybe I can help you out. Maybe we can, you know, figure out how to live through this together. Maybe I can help you in any way that I can. I can help you with getting your VA disability. I can help you with dealing with medication, sexual issues, because I know I have problems, all kinds of things. It's just very difficult living with these problems. I can tell you that right now.

When I got removed from the military, I had no explanation on how to deal with my issues at all. I got, hey, here's the boot. Get out. Nothing. Pain. I can tell you, number one, a brain injury is a really unique thing. Severe brain injury is very unique. Now, I'm functioning, or I was functioning. My left hand is really bad. My left leg is really bad. I don't know if that's the MS or the brain injury.

I had a kid. I had to find a job, and I ended up being a maintenance manager in a maintenance department of a small plastic injection molding company in McAllen, Texas, which is absolutely the worst place you can be if you have MS, because heat and MS don't go together. So that's where I started my civilian career. And it was very difficult. Didn't know that I had MS. Didn't understand what a brain injury actually does to you. And so that was hard.

I learned how to work on injection molding machines, robots, and those kinds of things. My left hand has always been kind of a clump, and that developed slowly over time. My left leg has always dragged behind since the accident. I've always had severe headaches, and my eyes blurred, working on small electrical devices and work around high voltage. That's kind of a hindrance and it can be a big problem. I just kind of had to learn to work around it.

Plus, the fact that I'm a high school dropout, I had to get my GED in the military. I had to teach myself how to fix these things and to understand the principles behind them and all of these other issues and things that I had to learn while I was suffering from these problems. It was really difficult, but it was a challenge that I had to overcome. And I had kids to feed.

So while I was dealing with my family and my wife and my children and these illnesses, I had to absorb a huge amount of information. I know a lot of you out there struggle with your problems. I'm trying to tell you that you can overcome just about anything because I overcame a lot of things.

Now, let's talk about these medications they have us on for a few minutes. These medications are necessary sometimes because the pain is excruciating. However, medications also take away a lot of how we feel and who we are. They reduce us in a lot of ways. You know, we don't feel anger anymore. We don't feel compassion. We're more like a living piece of wood. So you have to consider that in your daily life is how much of me are these medications actually taking away from me, right? These antidepressants and these pain pills and, I mean, all this stuff that we're taking, how much is actually being taken away from me? How much of me is actually left after I take all this?

And that's really hard to say. Some of the stuff you actually gotta have because otherwise, you're a monster because I know I am. But some of the stuff, I don't know. You know, that's something else we really need to delve into. I mean, what do we actually have to take and what should we really take?

So let's look into some of this medication and find out what it really does and what it's really doing to us, you know, and seriously, man, don't try to escape through alcohol. Don't try to escape through other drugs, but let's look at some of this medicine and see what's really happening. And maybe we can get some guest speakers on here and maybe we can talk to some real people, some other people that are dealing with these problems and find out what's really going on in their lives. You know, there's so much we can get into.

Anyhow, that's it for me right now. I just wanted to start this podcast with a real, I don't know, thing. Thank you for listening.