Children’s Health

Because my daughter’s a Gulf War baby, that’s what I call her. She has a heart condition and she has a VSD, a hole in her heart. Now I don't know if that’s Gulf related, but studies have shown that a lot of Gulf War parents have had babies with defects. And so when I take her, when she was younger and now she’s older, but when she was younger and I would say, she’s a Gulf War baby, physicians would look at me and just kind of shake their head and be like, what? And then I’d have to explain to them, and they’d still be like, mmm whatever. Well it does exist, and there’s been lots of children that have been born with defects. So that would maybe be another study. But I believe that that is a thing, because things that she’s had, she’s been, as she’s gotten older now, now she’s starting to experience joint pain and pains that I can relate to. And so I don't know if that’s something that we as Gulf War Veterans brought back with us and that our, gave to our children, genetically. But I know that she has been talking about issues that she has, but she does have the heart defect also. And I know one of the, one other female in my unit that went over with me, she had three children and each one of them had to have open heart surgery.

And I thought, that doesn’t seem quite right. So, and it wasn’t, I took him into an early intervention thing, in I think we were living in Redmond then. And, he, they said, well his vocabulary’s really good, but he still seems pretty autistic to me. You know, but they couldn’t qualify him as autistic, because he spoke too well. You know they said, well you know his IQ’s so low, he’s never going to read, he’s never going to do this, he’s never going to do that. It’s like, you can’t tell me that, you can’t tell me that your little standardized IQ test, that has nothing to do with who he is, is going to tell you that he’s never going to read. ‘Cuz that is like a no-no for me. All my kids read, period. And he does, he does read. It took me months, to get him even interested, but, and that’s the way Bryson rolls, you know. But, he, right now he’s re-reading the Harry Potter series, at Western State Hospital. So, he’s, you know he’s still growing, and not, he’s never going to be probably beyond the age of 12. The boy can survive, and that’s the best skill probably I can ask for, that he has. So, there’s him. That’s the first one, that that country took from me.

Well, from what I’ve read, they all have a fair amount of the same symptoms. Autism is a big one, being you know said that they're autistic. But they have some sort of neurological abnormality, and they have big heads. Okay, Bryson’s got a little head, he’s got just the opposite. But he’s, you know they suffer from mood disorders, I mean it’s really very similar, I think to what the Veterans suffered, when they hit country. You know right after, these are all just my theories. You know, right after the virus was working its way through the system, you know through their systems, they went through the chills, and the fevers, and the headaches, and the anger, and you know that’s I’m sure part PTSD, and maybe I’m wrong. But, I think it can be a sign of neurological damage, as well. And, I think that’s what the virus ends up doing, is affecting them neurologically. Well, a lot of these kids, the Gulf War babies are neurologically damaged, most of them, are, with different random, different diagnoses. Bryson had like fifteen different diagnoses, none of them really quite fit him. But they're close enough for him to get services, and that’s really all I care about.

But it was early on, 'cuz I didn’t want to have children because of it. And, there are a lot of stories of people that served, just one person that you know in the couple that was over there, and the kids coming out with problems, and the fact that my ex-husband and I were both over there. I was scared to have children. So we didn’t, and then I just got you know older and you know I’m fine with it now. But that was, initially why we didn’t have children, 'cuz I was very sick. And that was pretty early on. So I’m thinking probably ’93, at least, if not before. That I thought, this you know this has all got to be, part of this, what I thought just a compromised immune system, 'cuz I just always sick. If somebody had a cold, I got it, but I always got it a lot worse. And, I think after you know going into the first year returning, you know after that point you kinda think, okay well this isn’t just, I’m really fatigued from deployment now, 'cuz now it’s a year later and you know my glands are still swelling, and my cough’s still there, and you know. I think it finally hits you.

So one of the things, and I'll go into it more with my kids, is because I had a kid prior to any of all this, and with him, there was nothing. So then after Saudi, I had Derry, and then I went back again to Kuwait and then came back and had Grayson. And both Derry and Grayson, both had issues like their first two years. Derry’s was more colicky, breathing, couple times in the hospital for her. Grayson, we were having him tested like all the time because he didn’t cry. He didn’t feel pain. He would get, he got stung by a bee one time when Veronica was holding him, and he just held his breath. And then we noticed that there was a wasp in between her and him, which luckily didn’t get her because she's allergic, and at that point, we didn’t know on him. But for him, a lot of blood draws. A lot of mood swings. He didn’t talk at all. He grunted. He was learning sign language, and then like everything kind of fell into place, and he just kind of took off. But those first two years, I mean we had his hearing tested because we thought he was deaf. The pain thing. What else was there. A lot of blood draws because he would go from just a happy kid to just awful. I mean just drop right off. I mean just in an instant. Anyway, that was kind of with my kids. That was after, I just feel there was some stuff that probably was residual, I think, that could have happened to him.