Cindy Foster, a paramedic and Army veteran from Williamsburg, sees trauma nearly every day — sights and scenes none of us would ever want to experience.
Car accidents, drug overdoses, sexual assaults, domestic violence and child abuse. She’s seen it all. After 23 years on the job, she’s had too many dark days to now count and describe in one sitting. They’ve added up like cord wood stacked high for a bonfire. It all came to a burning point several years ago where she had to get help herself.
“I basically couldn’t take seeing one more dead kid,” she tells me.
She’s in a better place today, but her own experience in finding a therapist who would listen and offer her solace gave her something invaluable and necessary in her profession — empathy.
That’s especially valuable, she says, when first responders approach a military veteran in a crisis.
“That look of loss and fear and helplessness — I’ve seen that look so many times,” says Foster, who still wears her dog tags, a trust builder with fellow vets. That vet-to-vet connection can be crucial, particularly at a time when so many veterans, she says, have lost hope and faith in the system.
This past March, after transporting a veteran at risk of suicide to Baystate Medical Center, she told herself that something had to get done.
It was at a moment where she was holding the veteran in her arms and trying to calm him down, and where no one — not the police officers in the room, not the Baystate nurse and not the attending medical doctor — could help. Why? Because they weren’t trained in how to relate with veterans and how to listen — really listen.
Well-intentioned first responders and emergency room personnel, she says, can actually cause more harm to a veteran if they don’t know military culture and a veteran’s unique psyche. Yelling at a veteran or using physical constraints, for example, can easily push a veteran over the edge, she says.
“This is a kind of post-traumatic stress that no one understands until you’re had it yourself and been there or have had the training or experience in working with veterans,” says Foster.
After that day, she told a nurse that something needed to get done. The number of episodes like this was far too many and rapidly reoccurring, Foster remembers thinking. That nurse then called Ida Konderwicz, a 25-year ER registered nurse and now Baystate Health’s injury prevention program coordinator. It didn’t take much convincing for Konderwicz, the spouse of a retired state police officer.
Last month, Konderwicz and Foster and a team of community partners hosted a day-long symposium at Baystate’s education center in Holyoke. It was appropriately named “The First Response for Veterans: Crisis Intervention and Supporting the Unique Health Care Needs of Our Veterans.” More than 100 people attended — social workers, first responders, police officers, medical doctors and nurses.
The day started with Springfield Police Department’s Sean Sullivan, an Army combat veteran who detailed his experiences as a deployed soldier and what does and what doesn’t work when working with veterans. Other speakers included experts in suicide prevention and mental health from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and from Home Base, a Boston-based program that provides care to veterans and family members coping with brain injury, PTS and other invisible wounds of war.
Other sessions included discussions about military culture and the readjustment challenges veterans face when they return from war.
The training was a first for Baystate, the largest medical provider in western Massachusetts. Several people came up to Cindy afterward and asked for more information, more training, more guidance and more help.
A common concern is that more and more veterans are starting to use behavioral health and urgent-care services outside the VA. Cindy has personally taken veterans to the VA medical center in Leeds. But the VA can’t do it alone, she says. There are too many veterans needing help.
With the VA MISSION Act, implemented in June, Congress made it a priority for VA to offer veterans private medical care when criteria are met. In many situations, veterans are now given the option to choose the VA for their health care services or to use care in the community.
According to VA’s own statistics, 14 out of 20 veterans who take their lives everyday are not using the VA. That means caring for veterans is everyone’s responsibility.
At the end of the Baystate conference, attendees were hungry for answers and looking for community solutions. The day’s last speaker was Larry Cervelli, a retired occupational therapist from Chesterfield, who is the founder and coordinator of the Western Massachusetts Veterans Outreach Project.
Cervelli said one major improvement area was something the Project has labeled, “The Just Ask Campaign.” Medical providers need to just ask when a patient comes into an emergency room or clinical setting if the patient has ever served in the U.S. military.
“Just ask,” Cervelli says. Then there needs to be information, resources and direction and guidance on how to best address the unique characteristics of veteran health care in a personalized, empathetic way.
The Project hopes to meet with area legislators to see if state government can help. Simple, right?
But health care is anything but simple with ingrained administrative practices, intake forms and computerized data bases, electronic medical records and the like.
Foster remembers talking with a veteran who told her he can’t wait for the system to figure this all out.
“He said, ‘I’m just so tired of being sick and tired,’” she remembers him saying. “And I get it. And I think that’s why so many are committing suicide.”
John Paradis, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, lives in Florence and writes a column published the second Friday of the month. He can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.