Issac Sims tried unsuccessfully to get help from the VA

Reeling from PTSD, Issac Sims tried unsuccessfully to get help from the VA
Stars and Stripes
By Martin Kuz
Published: November 3, 2014
3 minutes ago

The label of PTSD intensified Issac Sims' self-alienation after his discharge from the Army last year. "He wore that with shame," said Patricia Sims, who has been gathering her son's military and medical records.
MARTIN KUZ/STARS AND STRIPES

Army Sgt. Issac Sims left the war in Iraq, but it didn’t leave him Part One

Part two of a four-part series

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The neighborhoods on Kansas City’s east side exist in various stages of entropy. Crime is commonplace, and residents accept without comment the sporadic pop of gunfire. Along Lawndale Avenue, shaggy lawns border houses that slump from weather and neglect, almost too exhausted to stand.

Patricia and Shawn Sims settled in the working-class area in 2000, buying a brown clapboard bungalow after years of moving around the country with their son and daughter in tow. They were drawn by the low cost of living and the proximity of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center two miles away. Then as now, Shawn traveled to the hospital several times a year for an array of physical ailments resulting from his combat tours in Vietnam.

Patricia believed war had affected their son’s mental health. Issac Sims sustained a traumatic brain injury from an explosion during his second tour in Iraq with the Army in 2010. The blast had fractured his genial nature.

“I was worried about how he’d been acting since he got hurt,” she said, dressed in a gray T-shirt with “Army” imprinted in black lettering across the front. She sat in the living room on a sagging leather sofa beside tote bags bloated with her son’s medical and military records. “I wanted to figure out what kind of help he could get.”
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