After combat, many Oregon vets continue to battle with unseen wounds

After combat, many Oregon vets continue to battle with unseen wounds
Published: Saturday, March 10, 2012
By Mike Francis, The Oregonian

BEND -- Oregon National Guard veteran Trevor Hutchison is a slow-walking casebook of post-deployment medical issues: bulging discs, pinched nerve, reconstructed ankle, traumatic brain injury and severe post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms including bursts of anger, memory loss, erratic sleep and anxiety attacks.

Yet none of this is obvious from looking at him or talking to him.

Randy L. Rasmussen / The Oregonian
Hutchison spends several days a week in his Bend-area home caring for Colleen, the 20-month-old daughter of he and his wife Sely.

At 36, he is enduring a protracted and bungled medical retirement from the military. The Department of Veterans Affairs has given him a 90 percent disability rating and declared him unemployable. He is as much as 70 pounds heavier and 2 inches shorter than he was when he went to Iraq in 2004 as a member of Oregon's 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry.

Oregon is full of young veterans like Hutchison, suffering aftereffects that are largely unseen.

They are scattered in cities, towns and farms around the state, where their difficulties are often invisible to those outside their immediate families. The Oregon Department of Veterans' Affairs said that 21,731 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns lived in the state in 2010.

Even with his demonstrable medical problems, his retirement from the military has been marked by delay and mistakes. After he complained to a staffer with Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., the Army admitted misplacing his file. Today, Hutchison's medical retirement seems to be moving again, but he cites a history of mixed messages and unresponsiveness from the Army's Madigan Army Medical Center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Madigan is in the news this month as the Army investigates whether it improperly resisted diagnosing troops with PTSD even when they suffered from it.

Last month the Army reinstated PTSD diagnoses for six soldiers. Hutchison says he has been through a similar wringer with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Portland. He says providers there accused him of faking his symptoms in order to get narcotics. He says two of the three surgeries VA doctors performed caused his problems to worsen, which is why he says he won't allow them to perform surgery on his spine.

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