Jean

Some of the things that I think that we were exposed to would be the pesticides they used, like our airplanes we have to spray before we can come back in country, and I know that that was DEET that they used. And any kind of pesticides, they're toxic. Depleted uranium. The pills that they gave us. The desert terrain. It's an environment, and it's entirely different than what we're used to here in the United States. There's, who knows what is in the soil or in the air, bacteria, or any kind of things that we could have been exposed to. The smoke from the oil well fires. The smoke in the air. The smoke from them burning trash and whatever stuff. The captured Iraqi equipment. Who knows what that was exposed to that was in our cargo compartment and that we handled and touched and breathed the air in around? When you deice, you use ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. There was numerous times where you're out. As an engineer, I would be either inside at the panel preflighting or outside as the scanner, preflighting outside. If the airplane is getting deiced, you get coated in that stuff. Jet engine fumes. Hydraulic fluid. 

I didn't talk to my cousin for two years because I was so upset with the way she treated me. We're friends again now, but it leads you to doubt yourself, and I think it contributed to the depression too, because you think that there's something wrong, but then you think, well, nobody thinks that there's anything wrong, so it must be me, so I just don't know how to get out of this spiral. And I’m still hurting and I’m still in pain and I still can't sleep. Did I do this to myself? It's kind of, it's hard when you don't have somebody to say okay, yeah, there is something wrong with you, and let's see what we can do to figure it out.

Be kind. You don't know what somebody else is going through, especially when it's something that you can't see. If somebody has got a broken leg or a big laceration, you can see that. You know that they're hurting because you can see the blood or the bone sticking out or the cast or whatever. So, a lot of the things that we deal with, with the autoimmune things is the fatigue, the pain, mental even. PTSD for people. You can't see that, and I think that makes it harder for people to realize what somebody else might be going through. So, be kind because you just don't know what that other person is really dealing with. Be kind. Be supportive. Be there for them. Listen when they need to talk. Don't try to fix everything, but just listen.

I think that they need to listen to their patients more, and I think that they need to expand the tools in their box. And a lot of it is not their fault. When doctors go to school, they don't get trained in nutrition, and they don't get trained in any of the alternative methods. However, many of those alternative methods have been around for thousands of years and actually do work. So, I would like to see the VA have alternative options. Medical doctors are great for acute care. If you're in an accident or there's some kind of emergency, they are wonderful. They know how to fix it. If they can fix it, they'll fix it. But long-term, sometimes lifestyle choice, illnesses, or things like this where there's no definitive, you know, this is what caused it, and here, this is what we do to fix it, those kind of things they're not very good with. They don't have training in nutrition to help people get away from their high blood pressure and their high cholesterol and their diabetes and their obesity. They don't have those tools in the box. Things like the hyperbaric oxygen. They do have acupuncture. I had one VA that I talked to, one doctor, and I said I found out that you could actually get acupuncture through the VA, and they said okay. Well, we'll give you a referral to a VA doctor at a different VA. They had an acupuncturist there. And I called them to find out if they would get me an appointment, and the acupuncture doctor said to me, well, what do you want this for? And I said, well, I want it for the fibromyalgia to try to help manage the pain. And he said to me, well, I don't think it will help with that, but you can come on in if you want. Okay. Uh, no. If the doctor doesn’t think he can help me, then he's not much of a doctor to me, in my mind. Again, that's another thing with the VA where I’m much better doing my own research and going on my own to find somebody than I am to try to use doctors like that through the VA system. It's not practical, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. So, I would like to see the VA more open to alternative and be able to offer more alternatives. Some people need prescription meds. Some people don't. Have the options available. Learn more about other modalities and incorporate that into practice. Why doesn’t the VA have a naturopathic doctor on staff? What's wrong with that? Why isn't that recognized? There are numerous ways to help people that don't include handing them prescription meds.

Do your research. Reach out if you need help. Find a support group. Find other people who are in the same boat and share information. Share what works for you and, I don't know. I wish that I could do more. I wish that I could have, like if I had unlimited amounts of money, I would love to have a medical center that could help these Veterans, that they could come to and not have to pay for and show them that there are alternatives. There are things that can help. Even if you can't fix it 100%, if you can fix some of the other problems like being diabetic or having high blood pressure and being at risk for heart attack and stroke. If you could fix some of those things, then the other stuff doesn’t, it's not as bad. If you’ve got 10 health issues, and you can fix three of them, now you’ve only got to deal with seven. Or you can fix two more, and now you’ve only got to deal with five, and it makes it easier. But when you're overwhelmed and overloaded with numerous health issues, it makes it a lot harder. So, I would, having a center where you could educate people and help people would be just awesome. But as far as what I would tell other Veterans, it would be mostly that it's just, the only person who cares about you is you, so you have to do your own due diligence, do your own research. Don't just sit there and complain, oh, I don't feel good. Do something about it. And I do understand just how hard that is because I've been there to the point where I couldn’t do anything about it, but you’ve got to find a way, even if it's just one little teeny tiny thing. You’ve got to a find a way and do your own research and find things that work to help you help yourself.

Then in 1990 and 2000, we got the anthrax vaccine. I had five out of the six shots, and I had a severe reaction. By the third shot, my arm was huge, red, welts. It started at the top of my arm and wrapped all the way down around my elbow onto my forearm. And all the symptoms that I had gotten under control all came back tenfold, with muscle pain being the worst. So, after my third anthrax shot, I became pregnant, which was not intentional, but I was happy with it, nonetheless. But by the end of the first trimester, I miscarried, and the naturopathic doctor said it was a good possibility that it was due to the anthrax vaccine because I had had three up to that point, and I had a lot of, I had such a reaction to it that it probably caused the miscarriage. That was just with a private doctor. No military or VA involved.

We stayed on the ground sometimes at certain bases in Saudi mostly, and it was long days, long hours. We were all tired, and I really, at the time, I really didn't think of it as anything other than just I’m tired and sore because we're pushing ourselves really hard. But after we got back and went back to like normal flying schedule, the symptoms persisted with the skin rashes and joint pain and migraines and muscle pain and short-term memory loss and sleep issues and extreme fatigue and things like that. So, in the middle of the '90s, like '94 and '95, I was so sick that I really almost, I felt like I couldn’t work, and I didn't know quite what to do about it. Back then, nobody really knew kind of what was going on with everybody and all these multisymptoms, so I went to a naturopathic doctor to try to get some help for heel spurs that had developed. I had gone the regular MD route and gotten no results with that, so I wanted to try acupuncture. And while I was seeing that doctor, he helped me immensely with the heel spur pain, and so I talked to him about Gulf War problems, the symptoms that I had. And we did a lot of cleanses and things. We did a lot of things, and I kind of got my health like managed. 

Just walking in general. Being able to go out and walk through stores and walk around the property here, or I've done a little teeny bit of hiking. Nothing strenuous, but I was able to do that and not be in bed for two weeks. Things like that. I’m more social now. I’m not hiding in my house all the time. I'll come out and visit friends and do things, and it doesn’t bother me to go to the store and have to, you know, I don't have to park right up next to the building. I can park further back. Let's see. What else? Hmm. I don't ride much, but I have been on horseback, and I think I could do that. I think I could ride. Let's see. I don't know what else. I can take care of myself, because for a while there, I couldn’t. I was on a cane and headed toward a wheelchair at one point because it was so bad, and now I’m not.

Well, I couldn’t do any kind of exercise because my muscles would hurt so bad and I would become so fatigued that I just couldn’t function. I can remember times when, I mean, I would find every shortcut you could think of so that I didn't have to do any more than the bare minimum. And I’m talking things like, I’m not going to take a shower today because it takes too much energy. I’m not going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning because I’m still tired. I’m going to sleep longer or just lay here and read or something because I don't feel like moving. Or I've gone to the grocery store—can I get all the bags in my arms and make it to the house in one trip, so I don't have to make a second trip? Can I find a way to get there without going up four steps? All these kind of things that you try to, you know, I’m going to park as close as I can to the store because I don't want to have to walk as far. There's a multitude of things that I would do to try to not have to exert any energy that I didn't have. I used to ride horses, and I would hike, and I would bike, and I would rollerblade and all these. I was a very, very active person, and I lost all of that. It all went away. I had a relationship while I was in the service and lost that because I was having trouble functioning. Well, there's more issues there. Both of us had some trouble functioning. But, you know, a lot of it had to do with him not understanding the pain that I was in, and the fatigue, so that affected our relationship. But there was, I mean, and then of course the depression, you know. It's a downward spiral. You don't want to do anything because you don't feel like it, and you can't do anything because it hurts so bad, so then you get more depressed, and you do even less, and that was my life for a long time. 

So, the migraines, and then the short-term memory loss was really scary, severe. That was another thing. I don't know if I mentioned that part in with the fatigue and kind of like a brain fog, but the short-term memory loss was scary. I mean, I could be sitting at the panel at the airplane and be looking at the fuel panel, watching the fuel transfer or something, and like space out and totally forget what I was doing while I was sitting right there with it in front of me. That scared me a little bit. That was one of the things that I realized that I really had to do something to fix what was going on, and just being not able to focus as well. And I was a walking phonebook before I went in the service as far as my memory. Like, if somebody would give me a phone number, I would remember it. And most of my family at the time, of course, that was way back before cell phones and having the number at your hand. But they would say, oh, what's so-and-so's number, and I would rattle it off to them. After all of this, I couldn’t even remember a four-digit combination half the time. My memory was just garbage. And I still struggle with some of that. It's not as bad as it was, but I do still struggle with the memory stuff sometimes. 

It leads you to doubt yourself, and I think it contributed to the depression too, because you think that there's something wrong, but then you think, well, nobody thinks that there's anything wrong, so it must be me, so I just don't know how to get out of this spiral. And I’m still hurting and I’m still in pain and I still can't sleep. Did I do this to myself? It's kind of, it's hard when you don't have somebody to say okay, yeah, there is something wrong with you, and let's see what we can do to figure it out.

Then in 1990 and 2000, we got the anthrax vaccine. I had five out of the six shots, and I had a severe reaction. By the third shot, my arm was huge, red, welts. It started at the top of my arm and wrapped all the way down around my elbow onto my forearm. And all the symptoms that I had gotten under control all came back tenfold, with muscle pain being the worst. The migraines would show up and last 24 to 36 hours with light and sound sensitivity and sometimes nausea. And it took me a long time to figure out exactly, well, and I still to this day, I mean, I don't know exactly what caused them, but I know that somewhere along the line, I developed some sensitivities to smells like laundry detergent and perfumes and chemicals, so I couldn’t walk down the aisle in a grocery store without triggering a migraine, like the laundry soap, that scent stuff. And I don't know what else. Let's see. Oh. Lacquer paint would trigger a migraine. I’m sure there were other things, but I’m not sure what. Cigarette smoke is an irritant to me to this day. 

The hyperbaric oxygen therapy made the biggest difference in my life out of anything. I’m not cured, and I still have days, but it has made a huge difference in my quality of life. I mean, I still can't do a lot. I’m not going to go rollerblading. That would just be stupid at this point, but you get a little older, you get a little wiser. You don't do the things that are going to hurt, because I have some issues with balance too, so that just wouldn't be a smart thing to do. But I don't have as many bad days as I had, and it's the hyperbaric oxygen therapy that really made a huge difference in that. And that was, let's see, maybe four or five years ago I think I had that. I did 40 sessions, and that's really made it, it's made life bearable. It's made life bearable.

Well, I wasn’t in the VA system yet in the mid '90s because I was still in the service. You could go to the flight doctor on base if you had problems, but if you did, they would ground you, and I didn't want to lose my job, so I didn't tell them anything about what was going on for the most part. As long as I was safe to do my job, I stayed out of the clinic on base. Now the heel spurs was a problem because that affected how I walked, so I went to, I actually had a regular civilian job for a little while, I think from '93 to '96, and I had insurance, so I went to a podiatrist or whatever, the people that look at feet. And they did the x-rays and showed the bone spurs, the heel spurs, and they tried, I don't remember what they tried. I know they did cortisone shots. None of it worked, and that's when I, between that and the other symptoms, that's when I started getting frustrated with regular MDs, and I decided to try to look for something else to help me because the pain was terrible. I just hurt every day, so I found a naturopathic doctor who did acupuncture and had him address the heel spurs. And when he was able to help me with that, then I went back at him with I've got all these symptoms. I was in the Gulf. I don't know what's wrong. Nobody, you know. I mean, you talk to the other, I would talk to other people that I flew with and see, and other people had symptoms too, but nobody was talking about it a whole lot because nobody wants to lose their job, you know. And nobody knew exactly what was going on. So, I had him address some of these other things, and he did some research, I guess, and he figured if we do some cleanses and try to detoxify my body that it would help, and it actually did help some. So, that was the mid '90s.

All the VAs are different. Some are worse than others. So, I have had, in all the doctors that I've seen, I have had one doctor through the VA who actually knew what I was talking about, made me feel like she understood what I was going through, and come to find out it was because she was a Gulf War Vet. Unfortunately, she was a temporary loan to the VA that I was at, at the time, and I got to see her maybe twice, and she got yanked out of there and put somewhere else. But she is the only one that I felt like I can talk to this person. I can explain stuff to her. She gets it. She understands where I’m coming from. And she wasn’t one of these ones who would try to say, here, you have to take this prescription.