Camp Pendleton is breaking ground in the way the U.S. Marine Corps treats what has become the signature injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The number of military personnel returning from overseas action with traumatic brain injury (TBI) is staggering.
Since 2003, more than 10,000 U.S. servicemen and women a year have been diagnosed with combat related traumatic brain injury.
Those numbers are expected to rise, especially in Afghanistan where insurgents are finding new ways to use bombs against U.S. troops.
An evolving threat on the frontlines means a major change in healthcare at home.
A kitchen on Camp Pendleton is designed to catch the often silent signs and symptoms of TBI and post traumatic stress disorder.
“A lot of time service members or their family will say 'They're just off. We can't quite pinpoint what's going on we just know that something's not right,'” said U.S. Navy LCDR Leah Geislinger. “Or the perception is 'They're not listening to me. They don't remember. They don't care' and it's not that they don't care, it's that they really are having problems.”
Even the most basic daily tasks like following a recipe or washing clothes can help identify who needs treatment.
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“If they can do the load of laundry and remember to not put colors and whites together they can also use those same building blocks and skills for doing something like sorting their different types of equipment for deployment, getting their packs together. knowing which type of uniform items go with what.” said Geislinger.
Studying the activities of daily apartment living is a new approach to rehabilitation born out of the age of the improvised explosive device (IED).
Better protective gear has increased survival rates but victims often suffer brain injuries that can be hard to diagnose and even harder to understand.
“You can't really notice that we have brain injuries or something wrong with us so from the outsiders view it looks like nothing us,” said LCPL Robert Chamberlain. “But then when we go to do something and we have processing problems, memory problems, the public is like ‘Oh what's wrong with you.’”
“When we're all together we try to get past that,” said Chamberlain.
“When you get a group of people together you find commonalities you've got service members who say, ‘That happens to me. You don't feel so alone and you don't feel so isolated,” said Geislinger.
Patients say the shared struggle in a safe environment makes the recover process easier.
“You see someone stuttering you try to help them with the word their finding, you see them doing something incorrectly, you try to help them out cause you automatically know if that was you you'd want help,” said Chamberlain.
And for a Marine whose specialty is cold cereal, there’s one more benefit.
“I'll be able to make dinner with a lot less mistakes,” said Chamberlain. “I'm not saying no mistakes, just a lot less.”
The activities for daily living apartment is the foundation for the "Return to Duty" program the Navy is developing that will offer specialized, job specific, treatment for TBI and PTSD patients.
