And then I asked her the same question I asked Tammy. “But if you aren’t satisfied physically, then what you are getting from him is not sexual. It’s filling some other need. Is that what you’re saying?” They both had the same response.
Yes. It fills a need. He’s like a drug and I’m an addict.
Tammy started feeling nauseated about a month after Sean left. Her friends wanted her to have an abortion, but she couldn’t get herself to do it. She wasn’t against the idea on moral grounds. It was Sean, and the thought of him being with her, inside her, even though he was gone, even though she hardly knew him. She didn’t have to explain it to me. You would understand if you could meet him. I can’t do him justice with my words, and this is where the similarities between Bob Sullivan and Sean end.
Tammy wrote to Sean and told him she was pregnant. A few weeks later, a small engagement ring was delivered to her office, where she worked as a dental assistant. That was all. Just the ring. She wrote him back a long letter, explaining that while she loved the gesture, it was not necessary, that they could work something out. He wrote back three words on a piece of plain paper. Yes or no? She answered right away. Yes.
That is the kind of man Sean Logan is.
Still, this was not a romantic love affair. Sean returned to marry Tammy and be with his young infant son, Philip. But his anxiety, and the behavior he used to self-medicate, were not conducive to marriage and fatherhood. He had no patience with his child. And by that I don’t mean that he lost his patience and was abusive. He just could not spend time with his family for more than an hour or so at a time.
I started to see that he wasn’t normal. It was like he had this itch he couldn’t get to and it tortured him. I wanted to just wrap him in my arms the way I did with Philip, wrap him so tight, he felt safe and would settle down. I loved him so much, but I couldn’t help him the way I could help my baby. He was beyond that. I didn’t understand about his anxiety back then. Neither did he. When his name came up again, we went to the base together, all of us. His mother was there, and two of his brothers. His father had said good-bye the night before. Everyone was crying, hugging him, making him promise to come home safe. I had the baby in my arms, and God help me, I couldn’t cry. I wasn’t happy to see him go, not exactly. But I was grateful that he was leaving.
Sean left for a fourth tour. He was on a sweep for a target in a small village. There were eight SEALs on the mission. He was the only one to come out. A platoon of marines found him unconscious, his right arm blown to shreds. He was dragged to the safety of an armored tank. His arm was amputated at a field hospital. It was there that they gave him the treatment.
Chapter Nine
Sean Logan became my patient exactly seventeen months before I began my work with the Kramer family. He was referred to me by a physician at the Naval Health Clinic in Norwich. This is the same doctor who sought Jenny Kramer’s records for her study of the treatment. She had followed Sean’s case closely upon his return. She had supervised his therapy sessions, allowing the hacks assigned to his case to misdiagnose him with PTSD. The symptoms were not dissimilar. Anxiety, depression, anger, suicidal thoughts. But this young man had been given a drug protocol in the field that was new and unpredictable. It was meant to reduce PTSD, not create it. And no one bothered to factor in his history with anxiety. It was not even listed in his records.
People wonder what is wrong with our health care system that we have fallen so far behind the rest of the civilized world. People blame it on our laws, or the drug companies, on the areas that have become “socialized” or the areas that are not “socialized.” Excuses, excuses. I don’t care what you’re getting paid or how hard you’re being worked. A patient sits before you. He has lost his arm in battle. He has lost his memory of the battle. Or, more precisely, it has been stolen from him. And now he has lost himself to his own mind. Is this man not worthy of your time? Is he not worthy of you taking a proper history—the kind I know you were taught in medical school, and again and again throughout your residency? There is no excuse. None at all.