Other Southeast Missouri veterans fighting health care battles

When the blistering begins, Chris Amacker says, it feels like his whole body is on fire.

The first time, he panicked.

"I remember throwing my wife out of bed -- I thought the bed was on fire," said Amacker, 35.

Amacker served a dozen years in the Army Reserve and Missouri National Guard in Cape Girardeau and elsewhere, including a tour of duty as a gun truck commander in Iraq in 2004. It was there, he said, that he was exposed to toxic gases. For a long time, doctors in the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system told him he wasn't suffering from the battlefield's chemical effects. Eventually, Amacker said, a VA physician conceded his symptoms -- the scorching boils all over his body, the stiffened hands and fingers, the pain to the point of passing out -- probably were related to gas exposure.

The treatment plan: "They told me to take a Claritin," Amacker said.

He says he does, and he says he still suffers from the debilitating blisters at least a couple of times a year.

Amacker, who was discharged from the Army in 2007, said he spent more than two years fighting the VA for disability compensation. Until he was approved, Amacker said, he was unable to work and lived below the poverty line, at times depending on a food bank for his meals.

"I can honestly say that the Iraq war took my life away," Amacker said.

He was a fellow soldier and close friend of Sgt. Lucky Sands, who died Feb. 16, 2010, in a VA hospital following a long illness. VA physicians eventually diagnosed Sands with lupus, among other health complications, but her family and friends believe the VA health system was negligent in its care of the decorated veteran, a charge the VA denies.

Sands also believed her illness was directly related to chemical exposure during her tour of duty in Iraq. She, too, waded through what fellow soldiers and friends saw as the morass of VA paperwork, waiting on disability compensation while she lived on food stamps and depleted her young daughter's college savings.

Amacker said there are many more soldiers in Southeast Missouri, Iraq war veterans, fighting the same bureaucratic battles he and Sands fought.

Terry Michael Dowdy was among them.

Dowdy, who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, takes a full medicine cabinet's worth of pills every day to combat the pain from the injuries -- physical and mental -- he says he suffered in the war: Diclofenac to reduce inflammation. Baclofen for muscle spasms. Hydrocodone for pain relief. Sertraline, an antidepressant Dowdy calls his "keep-me-out-of-prison" pills, to take the edge off his post-traumatic stress disorder. Gabapentin for nerve and back damage. And sleeping pills. Without this pharmaceutical mix, Dowdy says, the pain is unbearable. He pays $8 per prescription through the VA, a good deal cheaper than many private insurance plans.

It was on the benefits side where Dowdy said he encountered the paperwork war.

Sands, he said, turned him on to seeking VA disability compensation. "I said, 'A lot of guys out there are worse than I am.' She said, 'Yeah, now, maybe,'" It took a few years to collect the benefits, he said. The VA approved 50 percent disability compensation for his post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, he said, after he contested the agency's original 30 percent assessment.

"I didn't have financial problems because I have good job," said Dowdy, of Tamms, Ill. "A lot of guys don't, and I feel for them. And there are a lot of guys who don't even want to go through the hassle with it."

The VA, by policy, doesn't address individual medical cases due to privacy restrictions, but the agency's benefits arm assesses disability compensation based on a set of medical standards; the higher the percentage of disability, the greater the compensation.

For veterans like Larry Smith, who served 31 years in the military, including missions in Vietnam and in Iraq, disability compensation and health care coverage weren't concerns. It was medical incompetence, the Chaffee, Mo., resident said, that cost him dearly.

"I said something about my hearing, so the VA got me a hearing aid. But to get a hearing aid they had to give me a hearing test," he said. "The doctor who gave me the test turned up the machine so loud that I got a ringing in my ear which I will have for the rest of my life."

He said he was informed the VA health care professional who administered the test has been fired.

"They said he did it to five other people," Smith said.

Amacker thought he left the war behind when he left Iraq. He said he was wrong.

"You come home and that's when your battle begins," he said of his personal struggles and long fight for VA benefits.

mkittle@semissourian.com

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