Vision Center of Excellence

I was deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006. We went on an offensive operation in the town of Yusifiyah. We had been engaged with the enemy on the day before. My commander had given me the mission to take up a position on a corner of a compound. It was right when I picked up the hand mic to tell my battalion commander, to make the call that I was about to move, and that's when an 82-millimeter mortar round landed 5 feet over my right shoulder. Instantly, I saw a flash and the loud blast of the mortar round. I was knocked unconscious, but, deep down inside, I was fighting, kind of, to wake up, to stay alive. The mortar blast had broken my nose. It fractured my right cheekbone. It enucleated my right eye. A fragment had went in my left eye. After 6 weeks, they were finally able to wean me off of the sedation and, at the time, a family member had to be the bearer of bad news: that I lost my vision. Second only to death, people fear blindness more than any other event in their life. More than cancer, more than loss of any other sense, loss of a limb -- even paraplegia. We can't replace the eye, yet, at all. There are numerous endeavors out, but, as to repairing you to be functional again, exactly the way you were? Unfortunately, we are not at that point. So there's no prosthetics; there's no computer systems. There's nothing we can do to give a person back sight that they've lost. Everything we do, whether it's our job, whether it's seeing our children, seeing our grandchildren, whether it's mobility -- all of these factors are greatly impacted. Vision is critical to life and having a brain injury, in a large percentage of patients, results in loss of vision or the inability to use your eyes to see, even if your eyes are normal and haven't been injured. People who have lost vision don't know how to deal with that and it's important to have a center, a place where they can feel there is hope, where someone will be there to take care of them, to help them figure out how to regain their lives and to bring back as much of the joy that they felt before they were injured to their lives. One of the beauties of the Vision Center of Excellence is that it's a joint Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense enterprise. Veterans Affairs has been providing blind rehabilitation for veterans and Wounded Warriors since 1948. The military closed their programs in 1947 and they were transferred to the Veterans Affairs. And, because of that, we've had decades of experience to build up a knowledge base, intervention techniques, and to make sure that we're using the most advanced technology to provide rehabilitation. In my opinion, the veterans administration visual rehabilitation programs are the best in the world. Their inpatient facilities that have an incredible staff and, really, an incredible track record of rehabilitating the Servicemen and -women to the fullest extent that that individual Serviceman or -woman would like. In the past, the goal was just survival. What we're looking for now is a full life. EISEMAN: There's a tremendous amount we can do in the visual rehabilitation world to improve quality of life and to make people who have serious visual impairment really become functional within society, in a way that they find rewarding and that they find improves their self-esteem and their self-worth. GAGLIANO: We're not just looking at how can we make you able to walk across the street. How do you move forward to getting a degree and taking on challenges with new communications tools that will allow people to truly live a fully functional life? In order to better understand what we're doing on the battlefield, we have to know what's happening to individuals when they leave the service or they're transferred to the care of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Registries are, I think, personally, one of the most important tools for physicians and for health care systems moving forward in the military, in the civilian world, throughout the globe. It gives us insight and it's not the incidental event that occurs with one patient that helps direct our training and helps direct our education and helps direct our experience; it's the fact that we can look at multiples. PARKE: What they're doing, in terms of developing a system that can follow patients, can follow problems, can follow events over many, many years, analyze a complex dataset and give you very clear answers to very important questions is truly profound. It's going to have an impact, not just here, at the Vision Center of Excellence; it's going to have an impact throughout the country. GAGLIANO: The future of the Vision Center of Excellence is bright. We have an opportunity that has never been presented before. We really can make a difference in people's lives. We really can find new ways of restoring vision and new ways of saving vision. I hope that, through the work we do in the Vision Center of Excellence, the loss of vision on the battlefield, as we've seen it in the past few years, will be something that we will not see in the future. Most of the Soldiers I've taken care of -- and I've been at Walter Reed since the beginning of the war and taken care of hundreds, if not thousands, of injured Servicemen and -women -- is that their attitude is really actually incredible. I think that's a testament both to the medical care that they're receiving, but also a testament to their motivation for doing the job that they're doing. CASTRO: To be born free is an accident, to have lived free is a blessing, and to die free is an obligation.