Families wage fight for brain-injured

Families wage fight for brain-injured
By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff | September 9, 2007


He never saw the trip wire.

US Army Private Vincent Mannion, hunting for insurgents near Tikrit, Iraq, on March 11, had just kicked down a steel gate when a booby trap made of two large mortar shells detonated.

A storm of shrapnel, incinerating heat, and a concussive force brought the cinder-block structure down on top of him and Sergeant Daniel Woodcock, his team leader in the 82d Airborne Division. Woodcock was killed. Mannion, a 19-year-old who grew up in West Roxbury, sustained deep shrapnel wounds to his arm and torso. He was unconscious, but alive. The more devastating injury was not yet visible.

The blast wave had rumbled through his brain, a sudden shock of high pressure then low that severely damaged his cerebral lobes while leaving his cranium - and the Army helmet meant to protect it - intact. He had suffered the signature wound of the war in Iraq: traumatic brain injury, or TBI, which has been diagnosed in nearly 3,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

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His family has joined and inspired a budding movement demanding specialized care for severe TBI patients in private facilities outside the military and veterans healthcare system - a system that many families of veterans, and some leading medical specialists, view as badly overtaxed and no match for the nation's best rehabilitative hospitals.

It is a step the military has sought to avoid and the Department of Veterans Affairs bureaucracy has adamantly resisted, because of fear of the cost of private care and pride in their own facilities and staff. Mannion is the first New England soldier to win approval for private hospital care for severe TBI - in his case, at Boston's Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital - and it only came after an intense campaign by his family.


Rest of article: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/09/09/families_wage_fight_for_brain_injured/