Person of the Week: Sgt. Eric Edmundson

June 29, 2007 — -- Sgt. Eric Edmundson struggled to don his military jacket Friday morning. Once in his dress uniform, he was prepared for one of the biggest days of his life.

Edmundson, 27, was badly wounded while on patrol along the Iraq-Syria border in October 2005. He survived the blast from a roadside bomb, but went into cardiac arrest while awaiting transport to an American military hospital in Germany.

Doctors worked for 30 minutes to revive his pulse. They did, but Edmundson suffered what's called anoxic brain damage. In laymen's terms, his brain was deprived of oxygen. He was left seriously impaired.

"Eric could not walk, talk, eat, didn't have control of his bodily functions," recalled his father, Ed. "He just continued to go downhill."

Ed Edmundson has nothing but good things to say about the treatment his son received at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. But, as with many other wounded vets, it is the postdischarge period he said that is badly flawed.

The U.S. Army sent him to the care of the Veterans Administration, which sent Eric to a VA hospital in Richmond, Va. There, officials recommended that Eric be transferred to a nursing home. He was told his son would never emerge from what was a persistent vegetative state. His family was incredulous.

"Eric needed to be receiving some pretty extensive therapy as quickly as he could get it," said Ed. "We just knew as a family that they [the VA] weren't able to -- or going to -- meet the needs that Eric had."

So Ed began searching his options. He knew that if the Army made good on its wish to discharge him, he would lose the chance to get insured care outside the government system. He insisted that his son be left on active duty. It was a hard-fought battle.

"Ever since Walter Reed," said Ed, "we were thrown into that labyrinth of bureaucracy."

Neither the military, nor his insurance, nor the VA wanted him to go to some private facility, he said. But Ed researched, educated himself, insisted -- and won the right for treatment from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.