"I couldn't hear music in my heart or my soul ... the music was gone."

Injured troops at hospital find healing in music
KATE RYAN
WTOP
June 2, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — Samantha Nerove is in a smart suit with matching bracelet and a necklace, her hair in a stylish French twist. She doesn't look like the image many people have of a wounded warrior.

She's not in a wheelchair. She has all her limbs. But she came home a wounded warrior and the PTSD was crippling.

"I was medevac'd in from the old Walter Reed from Baghdad. With severe PTSD. And I was not in good shape. I didn't know if I could get through each day. I couldn't see through the next day and next week wasn't even on my horizon. I didn't eat with people; I didn't want to be around people. I would go into the dining facility, get my food to go, take it out to my car, sit in my car and eat it," Nerove says.

But she noticed that every Friday, a group of musicians, a trio playing stringed instruments came to play.

"I would walk out," she says. And Nerove made an unnerving discovery. She had no recall of music. She could enjoy it when it was played in front of her but ask her to hum a tune and she couldn't do it.

"I couldn't hear music in my heart or my soul ... the music was gone."

Nerove takes a moment to collect herself, but the tears well up in her eyes.

"One of the things that had been destroyed by the rockets and the bombs and the bullets and the bodies was music. It had been blown out of me mentally," she says.
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