Word: specialist
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...tone in OT could shift from laughter to grave silence in the moment it took a soldier to scream in pain or explode into anger. Captain Katie segregated the angriest amputees. Her morning sessions bristled with tension. Metallica and Motorhead blared from speakers. One specialist who had trouble picking up a peg with his above-the-elbow prosthesis flung the $115,000 device against a wall. "I ain't doing it anymore," he shouted. Another threw the metal pedal of his wheelchair into a costly exercise machine...
...moods fluctuated between anger and joy, frustration and triumph. But a feeling of melancholy prevailed as I came face to face with the larger tragedy beyond my own: stolen youth. Specialist Hilario Bermanis, 21, had been built like a fullback when he left his home in Micronesia to join the Army. Now he was hunched in a wheelchair, a thick neck and broad shoulders the only reminder of his once muscular body. He had lost his left hand and both legs above the knee to a rocket-propelled grenade in Baghdad...
...Specialist James Fair, 22, had the cruelest of all fates; not only had he lost his sight, he had no hands for Braille or a cane. Still recovering from a brain injury in late December, he was wheeled into OT for sensory perception tests. He rolled his head back and forth, unresponsive to the therapists...
...Even Tami had her emotional limits, though. Down the hall, a 22-year-old specialist named James Fair wouldn't accept the loss of his two hands. He had also lost both eyes when a bomb he tried to defuse exploded, and nerve sensations tricked him into thinking he still had hands. He kept asking Tami to pass him objects. "James, you don't have any hands," she'd reply. He'd refuse to believe her, demanding next that she hold one of his stumps...
...Some caretakers intentionally kept their distance from the soldiers to maintain their morale. Captain Kathleen Yancosek couldn't get close enough. A rehabilitation specialist known by everyone simply as "Captain Katie," she was a razor-thin blonde who almost dissolved into tears when she visited her first patient on the ward, a teenage soldier who had lost a leg in Iraq. He was crying from the pain. His mother was hysterical. The 27-year-old therapist braced herself, realizing that she was supposed to be the one whom they had confidence in to help him get better...