NEW YORK—“There are days that I haven’t talked to anyone about. I know it’s spinning around in there, and I know the words, but I can’t put a voice to it. It’s almost like my body won’t let me. And it’s a really weird feeling.”
It took Elana Duffy two years after leaving the military to even think about getting help. Her traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were taking a toll on her life. She was often angry, either suddenly shouting at people or totally apathetic, and she couldn’t hold down a job.
But she didn’t trust doctors and had lost hope that the system would help her.
“Because we’re military, we have to adapt, and we have to push through it—we have no idea how much we have in there to process,” she said.
Duffy was a counterintelligence and interrogation specialist in the U.S. Army, with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I kept avoiding treatment because [I thought], ‘I had adapted before, why can’t I adapt now?’” she said.
Duffy’s recovery is made more challenging by a brain injury she sustained in Iraq in 2005, when a roadside bomb exploded near her Humvee.
The shock wave from the bomb hit her right in the face and whipped her head back against a metal plate. Although she was wearing a helmet, the impact knocked her out and caused both her ears to bleed. But she told everyone she was fine and the convoy continued.
“That was a rough day—which I only know because I was able to read the reports later,” she said. Once the convoy arrived at the destination, her partner asked her if she was ready for the meeting, and she thought, “I don’t know what we’re doing here. Where are we?” recalled Duffy.
She was reading everyone’s name tags off their shirts because she had no recollection of who they were. “I thought I was having a massive stress reaction, I had no idea what was happening. I had just been knocked out and I thought I must be stressing out.”
Two or three days after the bomb incident, Duffy was sent to the combat mental health unit—“a little kiosk somewhere”—for a checkup.
“You take an interrogator [like me] to combat mental health and I know exactly what to say to these guys to get me back on the road,” she said. “I’m not getting sent home for being stressed out.”
She was cleared for duty and developed compensation skills for her memory—mostly using Post-It notes.
After she got home from Iraq, her symptoms worsened, her headaches intensified, and her sight was affected.
“I graduated early from college and now I can’t remember what happened yesterday or what a person’s name is,” she said. “When I was 14 years old, I was seventh in the state on balance beam and now I can’t walk in a straight line.”
For two years, to Duffy’s growing frustration, doctors told her nothing was wrong with her physically, so she stopped reporting her symptoms out of concern they were psychological and she would lose her job. Meanwhile, she was assigned to run a counterintelligence and counterterrorism field office in Germany.
Finally, in 2008, while in Germany, she reported her symptoms to a trusted physician’s assistant and was referred for an MRI scan.
