One of the guests in the congressional gallery at last week’s State of the Union address was Roxana Delgado, an advocate for soldiers returning home with traumatic brain injuries. Her husband, an army sergeant who NPR profiled in June, 2010, had been dramatically affected by the concussion he received from a roadside blast in Iraq.
The story, reported and produced with ProPublica, detailed Victor Medina’s inability to read, speak and think. Prior to his injury, he was in charge of 45 to 60 other soldiers in Iraq.
But as a result of the reports by NPR and ProPublica, a member of congress investigated treatment of soldiers at Fort Bliss and last spring, Medina became one of the first patients at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICOE), the military’s $65 million, state-of-the-art treatment center for brain-injured soldiers….