VET ‘DUMBFOUNDED’ AFTER VA
U.S. Marine combat vet Brian Callahan sat in stunned silence. A doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital had just asked him what the Veterans Administration thought about a brain mass he spotted on Callahan’s MRIs.
“I looked at him and I said, ‘Excuse me?’ ” said Callahan, who was seeing the growth for the first time on the neuroendocrinologist’s screen. “He just kept pointing at it with a mouse on all the scans. He just kept looking at me going, ‘And the VA’s never said anything?’ He was dumbfounded.”
Callahan felt a moment of vindication, then fear, then anger.
“The VA kept telling me that, you know, there’s really nothing wrong,” he said. “I was like, finally, I’m not crazy. This is something that’s really going on ... I was horrified.”
The 30-year-old former lance corporal from Dracut had been a machine gunner with 3/8 Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been rattled by several improvised explosive device blasts, and got a concussion from one. His November 2016 visit to Mass General was the first time the VA’s images of his brain were reviewed by a non-VA doctor.
In the six years Callahan had been going to VA hospitals in Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury for treatment of debilitating seizures, he had never been told anything about the mass, which is benign and located between his pituitary gland and ocular nerve. He said the VA docs always chalked up his symptoms to stress, migraines or vertigo, and told him they couldn’t see anything amiss on his brain.
Callahan — with a faulty diagnosis and a low disability rating — continued to struggle with the seizures, lost his job at a diesel trucking company and went on Mass Health, through which he ended up at Mass General.
Doctors there told him the mass was causing a growth hormone deficiency. They put him on hormone injection and an anti-seizure medication that the VA had never prescribed. Since then, he said his seizures have been much less severe and less frequent, and he’s feeling less irritable and less depressed.
“I can’t believe that if I hadn’t gone to Mass General,” Callahan said, “I would have just kept living my life like this.”
Callahan’s story comes on the heels of a Herald report yesterday on how the Boston VA’s benefits office has been repeatedly criticized by the VA Inspector General’s office for mishandling TBI evaluations over the past six years, failing to assign the proper degree of disability, and in some cases stiffing vets thousands of dollars in benefits.
Callahan’s frustrations echo those of thousands of vets who suffered traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and