“We’re really at an infant stage in terms of our clinical ability to assess traumatic brain injury,” a medical expert said.
Before he ended his life, Ryan Larkin made his family promise to donate his brain to science.
The 29-year-old Navy SEAL was convinced years of exposure to blasts had badly damaged his brain, despite doctors telling him otherwise. He had downloaded dozens of research papers on traumatic brain injury out of frustration that no one was taking him seriously, his father said.
“He knew,” Frank Larkin said. “I’ve grown to understand that he was out to prove that he was hurt, and he wasn’t crazy.”
In 2017, a postmortem study found that Ryan Larkin, a combat medic and instructor who taught SEALs how to breach buildings with explosives, had a pattern of brain scarring unique to service members who’ve endured repeated explosions.
“Your injuries are not service related”
“Best I can do is 50%”
“But that would make me 130% disabled…”
“Best I can do is 90%”
Ah yes, the VA, the only institution that has its very own math. 50+50+30+10=70
Where 60% is 100%, if you can get it.
VA math:
50%=50%
+50%=50%×50%+50%=75%
+30%=25%×30%+75%=82.5%
+10%=17.5%×10%+82.5%=84.25%
I want to rewrite that scene from Liar Liar when Jim Carey yells at the impound driver to fit the VA claims process.
Oh yeah!
“What are you gonna do…”
NOTHING! Because you will just lose my paperwork and make me resubmit for years! Then you will send me to a doctor that is 105 years old and hates that the sun came up. Your board will look at my gunshot wound and say it’s not service related. So I am going to piss and moan like an implant jerk.
That just makes me want to scream all over again. It took me nearly a decade and a AL judge to get the VA to listen to me.