Word: walter
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...used to get chocolate milk delivered to our beds. The amputees of Walter Reed Army Medical Center were accustomed to first-class service as a matter of hospital policy. "The Ritz-Carlton is where you want to go, not Motel 6," the head nurse of Ward 57 told her staff after the Iraq war began in 2003. "That's how I want all my patients treated...
...courtesy that apparently stopped at the hospital's front door. According to a series in this week's Washington Post, some wounded soldiers have lived amid mice, mold and mismanagement in outpatient facilities. It was a shocking account to ordinary Americans who know of Walter Reed by its spit-shine, high-tech image, but especially to me. An embedded reporter who lost a hand in a grenade attack, I was treated at Walter Reed as an in-patient from December 16, 2003 to January 8, 2004, when I left for my home in Washington. I returned regularly to the hospital...
...Ironically, it is advances in medicine - not to mention an overabundance of bureaucracy as well - that created this war's unprecedented number of recovering outpatients. In past wars, injured soldiers were treated and discharged to VA hospitals for follow-up care. Walter Reed has kept them longer to improve use of the latest prostheses or ease post traumatic stress disorder and mild brain injuries, maladies rarely diagnosed in Vietnam...
...Major General George W. Weightman, commander of Walter Reed, says another reason for the long tenure of outpatients - the average length of stay is almost 300 days - is that many wounded soldiers who had joined the volunteer army hope to stay in uniform. "We want to work with them as long as we can to get to that point of maximum medical benefit and give them the best chance of remaining on active duty," Weightman told...
...Walter Reed shouldn't be punished for extending its top-notch medical services to soldiers longer than military hospitals have in past conflicts. A leading center for amputations and brain injury, it has achieved amazing breakthroughs and revived function and hope for soldiers who would have died in past conflicts...