Read her full story here.
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Veteran spouse/caregiver Megan Quigley Crisci:
“Our financial struggles turned into a family crisis while waiting on his benefits. Our daughters began to see that something was wrong with Daddy and their little minds simply could not understand. I had been neglecting myself for so long that I ended up having two surgeries in two years and was never really allowed the necessary time to recover so I was beginning to suffer physically as well. Things were bad. I can remember one day while I was lying in bed, in pain from my first emergency surgery and thinking that I used to feel that a deployment was the worst thing a military wife or family could go through. The long days and nights that were lonely and often scary. I thought nothing could be worse. Other than the loss of your loved one, of course. But now I realized that I was so wrong. I began to think that going through the deployments were easy compared to what we were now going through. I said to myself that deployments are hard but deployments come to an end. What we were going through now was much worse. Deployments come to an end. Deployments have homecomings. This. Life after the military, now as a disabled veteran, this doesn’t end. This is life now and now life is all what we make of it. Some might say you are in control of whether or not you want to be happy. While I agree with parts of that statement, there are parts of me that also understand that life with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injuries makes it difficult for one to just simply choose whether or not you want to be happy. When your only option for health care is less than what you could ever imagine to be acceptable. To now be in a system where you are truly on your own to navigate. To be in a world where you are told that people care and that they are there to help you but those are only words. The things that actually happen should sometimes be considered criminal.”