Nurse finds healing from post-traumatic stress

Nurse finds healing from post-traumatic stress
by Elaine Wilson
American Forces Press Service

2/12/2010 - PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, Md. (AFNS) -- As a critical care nurse, Lt. Col. Mary Carlisle's focus always has been on helping others. It wasn't until a harrowing deployment to Iraq that the tables turned, and she became the one in need of aid.

Colonel Carlisle described her battle with post-traumatic stress disorder and the healing she eventually found at the 2010 Military Health System Conference held at the National Harbor here.

Colonel Carlisle, then a major, deployed to the Air Force theater hospital at Balad Air Base in 2007. She worked the night shift, when most of the casualties seemed to come in, she said, and took care of U.S. servicemembers, as well as Iraqi soldiers, women and children.

"I knew from Day 2 that this was going to be stressful -- the combination of heat, sleep deprivation, noise -- (and the) inundation of helicopters coming in one right after another," she said. "And you just knew that they had casualties on them."

The wounds were like nothing the seasoned critical care nurse had ever seen.

"These were just horrific," Colonel Carlisle said. "People with no arms, no legs; people that by all rights shouldn't even be alive, and they were."

The health care team did everything they could to save each patient, but often all they could do was provide comfort in the inevitability of death, she said.
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