Page 10A
OFF PAGE ONE
East Oregonian
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
RED BADGE: Veterans start process by telling jokes SUICIDE:
Continued from 1A
interpreter, radioed his captain for
instructions. Hold fire until the
water buffalo reaches the wire, the
officer said, then shoot. Boy and
beast continued forward. Nichols
yelled at him in Vietnamese to turn
back, but the pair kept going until
reaching the perimeter fence.
“Time seemed to stand still,”
Nichols read aloud to the audience.
“And then, as one, all three of us
fired. The boy’s body shuddered.
His right arm flew up as if waving
good-bye to us.”
The water buffalo charged
forward, Nichols said, dragging
the boy’s limp body through the
concertina wire. The men shot
the animal and “puffs of red mist
briefly filled the air.” The water
buffalo staggered and fell atop the
boy.
“Then there was silence. I
remember thinking it was the
silence of death,” Nichols read.
“My hands were shaking.”
Nichols’ next sentence ushered
the audience into his own personal
gut-wrenching reality by revealing
one more incomprehensible truth.
“We later learned the boy had
been mentally handicapped since
birth,” Nichols said. “He had
simply wanted chocolate like the
kind we gave out while we were on
patrol.”
Nichols left the stage to
applause. Many of those clapping
looked emotional at this glimpse of
wartime experience.
Like many returning warriors,
Nichols deals with PTSD. He’s
spent time in counseling and even
returned to Vietnam as a way to
cope. Many, however, never find
their way past the flashbacks,
nightmares and depression. Many
— some reports say as many as
22 veterans per day — commit
suicide. Actor Tom Skerritt, known
for leading roles in “Top Gun,” “A
River Runs Through It,” “Alien”
and other films, co-founded the Red
Badge Project after having dinner
with some Colorado veterans
affected by PTSD.
“They were physically and
emotionally wrecked,” Skerritt
said. “They looked around furtively.
Staff photo by Kathy Aney
Vietnam veteran Bob Park, of Helix, reads a story he wrote during
a Red Badge writing workshop for veterans with PTSD. He and
five other veterans spoke Friday at the Gesa Power House The-
atre in Walla Walla.
They couldn’t engage. That stayed
with me.”
The result was the Red Badge
Project, a way to tap into imagina-
tions and feelings and slay the beast
within through writing.
“You can’t intellectualize this
stuff,” Skerritt told the Gesa Power
House audience. “You can’t treat it
with drugs. You just have to feel.”
He and co-founder Evan Bailey
avoided heavy memories at first
during the workshops.
“We started with laughter,”
Skerritt said. “We passed out joke
books to a bunch of angry soldiers.”
The men took turns telling
jokes. Later, they progressed to “Yo
Mama” insults like “Yo Mama is so
old, she was a waitress at the Last
Supper.”
“As they laughed, they got
better,” Skerritt said.
The men and women wrote
about positive parts of their lives
and then dared to examine painful
memories and write about them,
too.
One of the presenters, Bob
Park, a retired teacher from Helix,
confronted death during the writing
workshop. He’d seen plenty of it
after being drafted in 1965 at age 21
and serving in Vietnam. He earned
a Bronze Star for surviving a heli-
copter crash and pulling others to
safety before the helicopter caught
fire. He survived fierce firefights
while others did not.
Park, however, wrote not of
wartime, but of the deaths that had
rocked his boyhood — an aunt who
battled cancer, his beloved dog,
Jeep, and his brother who had died
after being hit by a car while riding
his new bike.
“There is no beauty in dying,
only in the memories that are left,”
Park read to the audience.
Another veteran, Bryce Ely, read
his essay, “The Tunnel,” in which
he recalled dropping to his knees
and crawling into a tunnel. Carrying
only a .45-caliber pistol, his knife
and his flashlight, he inched ahead.
“The air grows stale and heavy
with the smell of musty dirt, the
smell I knew as a kid hiding in the
crawl space under my house during
childhood games of hide-and-
seek,” he read.
The tunnel narrowed. Sweat
stung his eyes. Imaginary spiders
crawled on his skin. He fought back
panic as he got temporarily wedged
before corkscrewing his body from
the tunnel’s grip. Finally he saw
light and the end of the tunnel. He
reached the opening and peeked out
into a void, a cliff that went straight
down.
“Holy s---,” he read, his closing
line.
Another veteran, Lydia Hales,
wrote of living with depression and
PTSD after suffering a traumatic
brain injury. She wrote of her battle
to simply do the things others
consider normal.
“I want to sleep without dreams,
without being haunted by specters
of the past,” Hales read.
Joseph Wankelman, a young
Army veteran from Colorado who
was photographing the event for
Red Badge, listened in the back of
the theater with a somber expres-
sion. Red Badge, he said in a low
voice, had saved his life.
“Without it, I’d be strung out on
drugs or alcohol,” Wankelman said.
“Telling your stories can save you
from the well of anger inside you,
but only if you are willing to share.
You have to invest your heart.”
Red Badge works in concert
with military psychiatric programs
at Veterans Administration Centers
such as the Jonathan Wainwright
VA Medical Center in Walla Walla.
Veterans wishing to participate
should contact their local VA center.
———
Contact Kathy Aney at kaney@
eastoregonian.com
or
call
541-966-0810.
NRA opposes
bill in hearing
Continued from 1A
In an emotional floor speech
May 1, Boquist said that three
members of his command killed
themselves during the second Gulf
War in Iraq.
“Everyone wants to promote
this as a gun bill. It’s not,” Boquist
said of the bill’s opponents.
“We are only trying to target
those individuals who want to
commit suicide and may murder
a spouse, children or roommate in
house. That is how we wrote it.”
Connecticut has had a similar
law since 1999. Several hundred
protection orders have been issued
since then, Boquist said. It’s “cred-
ited with saving lives” and has been
upheld by the courts, he said.
About 40,000 people take
their lives nationwide each year,
according to federal statistics.
Oregon has one of the highest
suicide rates in the nation, including
among veterans, Boquist said.
The National Rifle Association
and the Oregon Firearms Federation
continued to oppose the legislation
Monday, July 3, during a hearing
in the House Committee on Rules.
Representatives from both groups
said the bill denies gun owners due
process and provides no mental
health services to address the root
cause of suicide.
“This Republic is about keeping
people free, and I wish it was within
our power to keep people safe, but
the fact is when we have a conflict
with the right of citizens, I have to
side with them,” said Rep. Mike
McLane, R-Powell Butte, who
voted against the bill Monday.
McLane said he planned to
present a minority report offering
an alternative to the bill on the
House floor later this week.
The bill allows members of the
same household and law enforce-
ment to obtain a temporary order —
up to 12 months — by petitioning
the court. The subject of the order
could contest it in court. The order
could be renewed annually.
NURSING HOME: More than 1,200 beds removed over three year period
Continued from 1A
declined across Oregon for
decades. People now have
more options than ever for
care that ranges from weeks to
years. Use of assisted living,
residential care, and foster
homes has mushroomed,
according to state officials.
They say consumers are less
likely to resort to nursing
homes, a choice dictated by
preference or by finances.
Yet in rural Oregon,
nursing homes remain a
key fixture in health care,
providing what no other resi-
dential facility can — around-
the-clock nursing care. Only
hospitals provide more
extensive medical attention.
Rural nursing homes in 2013
were considered so important
legislators once labeled them
“essential” assets for rural
communities.
State
officials
still
consider them so.
“We don’t want a commu-
nity not to have a nursing
facility option,” said Mike
McCormick, deputy director
of the state’s Aging and
People with Disabilities unit
of the state Department of
Human Services.
Yet nursing home opera-
tors say state policies are to
blame for weakening rural
nursing homes, which by
virtue of their location face
higher costs.
“We’re in danger of losing
vital access to vital services
in rural communities,” said
Jim Carlson, president of the
Oregon Health Care Associ-
ation.
In Baker City, the county’s
only nursing home closed last
year. The home opened in
1987 with 80 beds; by early
2016, just 15 were occupied.
In Prairie City, Blue
Mountain Care Center has
seen a steady drop in resi-
dents, including a decline of
an average of 15 residents
relying on state help to 10.
The
resident
count
has dropped as well at
Milton-Freewater Health and
Rehabilitation Center. The
center expanded its therapy
staff to increase patient
numbers.
“We have struggled to
have a full therapy depart-
ment, thus limiting what we
can offer for rehabilitation
services for the community,”
said Russell Patterson, exec-
utive director.
In La Grande, two nursing
homes merged and La Grande
Post-Acute Rehab reports
steady client numbers. Yet
stays are shorter.
“It just makes running a
skilled nursing facility more
challenging,” said Steve
Hamilton, executive director
of the La Grande facility. It
now has 38 residents.
Sullivan says state conduct
in part forced the decision to
close Presbyterian, which
has served Malheur County
more than 60 years. She and
others believe state workers
steer consumers away from
nursing homes or press
residents to move out sooner
than they should.
Sullivan said her census
of patients who rely on
state-paid care has dropped
steadily in recent years. In its
current budget year, Presby-
terian has lost $300,000.
Tom Hathaway, adminis-
trator of Pioneer Place, which
has a nursing home as well as
assisted living in nearby Vale,
has seen the same trend. The
drop has been so precipitous
that Hathaway was preparing
his board for a decision to
close its nursing home. That
decision is forestalled now by
the loss of the Ontario home.
But unless something
changes, “we’ll be lucky to
last a year.”
Hathaway has been
pressing the state to explain
why it is sending fewer
clients to nursing homes.
The health care associa-
tion is pressing as well.
OREGONNRESIDENTS
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QualifiedNlow-incomeNresidentsNofNOregonNmayNreceiveNaNfreeNphoneN
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“It’s been a pretty aggres-
sive program the state’s been
running,” said Carlson.
In 2013, state officials and
the nursing home industry
agreed that Oregon had too
many nursing home beds still
in use after the shift to less-in-
tensive care took hold. They
agreed to eliminate 1,500
beds over three years out of a
total of 12,332. The program
was aimed at western Oregon
and particularly urban areas.
The state would reward the
industry for hitting targets,
and pay less in daily rates if
it didn’t.
The industry got close,
getting rid of 1,210 beds.
“Now we’re in the stick
era,” said McCormick, to
get more beds taken out of
service.
Nursing home officials
said while it made sense to
take empty beds offline in
the Willamette Valley, the
state seems determined to
cut nursing home use in all
corners of the state.
McCormick insisted that’s
not so.
“The consumer preferences
are overwhelmingly obvious,”
he said. “People do not want
to live in a nursing facility for
a long period of time.”
He said state workers help
patients get the right care in
the right place. He said the
state emphasizes indepen-
dence, dignity and choice.
Sullivan said Presbyterian
advocated for residents who
wanted to stay in the nursing
home rather than move to a
lower level of care.
“On occasion, it worked,”
Sullivan said. “Often, it
didn’t.”
She became convinced
that health care wasn’t the
only issue.
“The factors were finan-
cial” in the state’s recommen-
dations to patients, she said.
Sullivan and others say
shifting patients away from
nursing homes has more
impact than just on the
finances of the business.
Carlson, of the health care
association, said he hears
complaints from members
who get patients from nursing
homes about “inappropriate
placements.” That means, he
said, that patients are moved
into health care facilities that
can’t treat them.
“They get very frustrated
when they get people whose
care needs are too great,”
Carlson said.
Hathaway thinks perhaps
one-fourth of those moved
out of nursing homes aren’t
people who can care for
themselves.
“Are they getting the
nursing level of care
they should be getting?”
Hathaway asks. “Probably
not.”
One
nursing
home
administrator who spoke
on background for fear of
angering state officials said
residents are moved out of
nursing homes too quickly
on occasion. He hears about
“bad outcomes including
deaths” but said no system in
H. Gale & Anita Eileen
Marshall would like to express
our deepest Thank You to our
many valued customers and
vendors who have supported us
over the past 40 years here in
Eastern Oregon.
the state tracks the impact of
such moves.
McCormick said “nega-
tive outcomes” happen at all
long-term care facilities but
the state relies on its case
managers and licensing teams
to detect issues. He noted that
Oregon recently ranked No.
2 in the country in effective
nursing home transitions as
measured by AARP.
Carlson said his associ-
ation is urging legislators to
examine the issue after the
current session. He said the
state also ought to consider
differing compensation for
rural nursing homes just as
rural hospitals get extra pay.
Ruth Gulyas of Leading
Age Oregon said her group
too is pressing the Depart-
ment of Human Services
to consider such an option.
She said the response to that
recent request was “they
were going to look into the
situation.”
McCormick said his
agency has never considered
such an option.
McCormick said that
while nursing homes are a
“critical” part of the health
care system, the state leaves
it to the marketplace to
determine their financial
viability. He was asked what
the Department of Human
Services is doing to ensure
their survival.
“I don’t think we’re doing
anything,” McCormick said.
“We’re executing the statutes
as written.”
———
Story written and reported
by Les Zaitz of the Malheur
Enterprise with additional
reporting by Kathy Aney of
the East Oregonian, Susan
Parrish of the La Grande
Observer, and Rylan Boggs
of the Blue Mountain Eagle
in John Day.
HEALTHY FRIDAYS
FREE health screenings & health coaching: Blood
pressure checks, weigh-ins, body mass
index, cholesterol and glucose.
First Friday of every month
8am-11am
GSMC Conference Center 7 (by Education Dept)
LIVING WELL:
BETTER CHOICES, BETTER HEALTH
Have you been diagnosed with high blood pressure,
heart disease, arthritis or another long-term health
condition? Find practical ways to living well by
making a step-by-step plan to improve your
health...and your life. Six weekly FREE classes,
open to patients, caregivers/support person or both.
Thursdays, July 13 - Aug. 17
3-5pm
Must pre-register, call 541-667-3509
Information or to register
call (541) 667-3509
or email
healthinfo@gshealth.org
www.gshealth.org