Sgt. Jamie Jarboe Shot by Sniper in Afghanistan, Killed By Medical Error

When you read the rest of this story, and I really hope you do, keep one thing in mind that the DOD and the VA had less doctors, nurses, claims processors and mental health worker than they had after the Gulf War, but they just hoped we didn't notice.

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Kansas Health Institute
By Andy Marso
KHI News Service
Dec. 22, 2014

Esther Klay
Melissa Jarboe documents the medical treatments her husband, Jamie, endured after being shot during a tour of duty in Afghanistan in April 2011. Jamie Jarboe underwent dozens of surgeries, including a procedure in which his esophagus was perforated, before he died in March 2012. Melissa Jarboe started a foundation called the Military Veteran Project and advocates for additional investments in veteran-supported nonprofits and the Veterans Administration health system.

TOPEKA — A sniper’s bullet tore through U.S. Army Sgt. Jamie Jarboe’s neck while he was on patrol during a tour of duty in Afghanistan in April 2011. The bullet shattered three vertebrae, severed Jarboe’s spinal cord and caused severe bleeding.

It was the kind of wound that almost certainly would have been fatal in previous conflicts.

But an Army medic was at Jarboe’s side almost immediately to keep him from bleeding out, and within 17 minutes of the shooting a helicopter lifted Jarboe out of the danger zone.

In less than an hour, he arrived at a state-of-the-art field hospital in Kandahar, where a medical team was waiting to stabilize him enough so that he could be evacuated from the country.

Jarboe arrived back on American soil paralyzed but alive and was able to get the best care the military had to offer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

But less than a year later he was dead from complications of surgery, one of several medical errors that his wife, Melissa Jarboe, documented in a self-published memoir about her husband’s last months.

“It wasn’t the sniper that shot him that killed him,” Melissa Jarboe, of Topeka, said in a recent interview.
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