By Senior Airman Jette Carr, Air Force News Service /
Published September 30, 2014
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AFNS) -- For one couple, the expression could be taken
quite literally. When Jeremiah Means first
met Ashley, she was tripping in front of him as she tried to rush through a
doorway. He called out to her to make
sure she was ok and in that moment, their relationship began.
When a couple talks about how they first met, a phrase
commonly heard is, “Well, they just fell into my life.”
Now, after eight years of marriage, it is Ashley who is
there to catch Jeremiah when he falls.
She not only holds the role of wife and companion, but also that of a
caretaker to her husband, an Air Force wounded warrior.
It is with Ashley’s dedicated support that Jeremiah is
competing in the air-rifle and hand-cycling events during the 2014 Warrior
Games here, Sept. 28 – Oct. 4.
The couple’s lives were first turned upside-down in
2009. Jeremiah was a senior airman in
the Air Force Reserve working to become a survival, evasion, resistance and
escape specialist; however, his plans were derailed after receiving a routine
medical shot. He had a rare reaction
that resulted in Susac’s Syndrome. The disease attacked his brain and caused
personality changes, a loss of mobility, vision impairment, and deafness. Because Susac’s Syndrome is such an uncommon
disease, for close to a year Jeremiah went misdiagnosed.
Jeremiah’s initial symptoms manifested themselves as
terrible headaches and behavioral outbursts.
Ashley said she remembered a day when Jeremiah returned home after
working a night shift and began acting strange.
She had put their infant son to bed and was relaxing in the living
room. Jeremiah was in the bedroom trying
to catch up on sleep, but he kept waking up.
“He was going through this weird cycle,” Ashley said. “He’d come out and start yelling and cussing
and screaming at me to be quiet. I was
reading or something. I wasn’t doing
anything, and he’d go back (to sleep) and it’d be completely quiet.”
After Jeremiah returned to the bedroom his confused and
worried wife went to check on him and watched as he would go from being sound
asleep to waking up, crying and holding his head as he rocked back and forth,
all the while complaining about noise.
As his condition worsened, they decided to seek immediate
medical attention. By the time they
reached the local hospital, Jeremiah no longer recognized Ashley and was
combative, irritated, and ultra-sensitive to light and sound. Due to the severity of his reaction, Jeremiah
was transferred to a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, where he stayed for more
than two months.
During his stay, Ashley said Jeremiah changed. His fine motor skills became impaired and he
forgot how to walk. Memories of names
and dates would also get jumbled in his head. Due to the still present disease,
the man who checked out of that hospital varied from the one who had originally
checked in.
“Coming home from the hospital, it was like being married to
a stranger,” Ashley said. “He wasn’t
anywhere close to the fun outgoing strong guy he had been. I’m not saying he was weak, but mentally, he
went back to about a 12-year-old mindset about things, because it attacked his
brain. It was like living with a strange
teenager.”
With both a baby at home and a husband who needed additional
care, Ashely’s position in the family radically altered. The hardest thing about being a caregiver,
Ashley said, was trying to figure out how to balance the family role she’d held
before Jeremiah got sick, with the one she has now. The main role she had to adapt was between
herself and Jeremiah – how to still be a wife and then provide extra support
without being overbearing.
“Just that change in somebody who was strong and never
needed help, to somebody who is still strong but needs help and doesn’t want to
ask for it; and walking that line of not trying to baby or be a nurse, but to
assist -- assisting in a way that doesn’t make him feel like I have to help him
because he can’t (take care of himself).”
Jeremiah admitted that for the first three years of his
illness, he was a hard person to be around.
He said Ashely had every opportunity to leave and if she had taken that
route, he wouldn’t have felt like she was doing anything wrong.
“I was only worried about me and honestly that’s not the way
it should have been,” Jeremiah said. “I
couldn’t hear, so I‘d yell when I talked, because if I can’t hear, how do I
know you’re hearing me? I just wasn’t
the old Jeremiah that I wanted to be and I just didn’t know how to go back to
that individual.”
Part of the couple’s healing process began though Jeremiah’s
participation in the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program’s adaptive sports
events, such as sport camps, the Air Force Trials and now, the Warrior
Games. Not only was Jeremiah welcomed as
part of a new Air Force team, but at the same time Ashley was also able to
connect with others going through the same adversity she had experienced.
“I didn’t have any military support group,” Ashely said. “So this, coming here was the first time I
felt like I was recognized as a caregiver.
I think it would have helped make life a bit easier, knowing other wives
who’ve gone through and are dealing with major changes to their family and
husband -- just knowing there are other people out there, because you feel
really isolated, or at least I did.”
She added that it has been encouraging to be surrounded by
other wounded warrior spouses who are staying committed and weathering the
storm, no matter how difficult their situations.
“I’ve had a lot of people say, well you’re just
extraordinary that you stayed with him,” Ashley said. “Well, isn’t that what I committed to - for
better or for worse? I’m going to stay with him no matter what. No, I’m not doing anything
extraordinary. I’m doing what I
committed to and sticking to it.”
As Ashley benefited from the new support, so did Jeremiah.
During the past year, Jeremiah said it felt like something clicked in him,
showing him how he needed to be living his life and supporting his family. Through this epiphany, Ashley said she’s seen
her husband start to mentally transform back into the man he was before.
“He doesn’t deal with stress well, but stuff like that I can
deal with,” Ashley said. “He loves our
son and he tries really hard to be a good dad.
He wants to be involved. He’s a
lot kinder most of the time, unless he gets upset, but then I think we all have
those days. It’s a lot better now
because he’s a lot more like himself.”
Jeremiah feels he wouldn’t be here right now if Ashley
wasn’t there to support him. In fact, he
said she was the one who told him to compete in the first place.
“I told her, ‘Honey, you know if I end up doing this I’m not
going to give it 100 percent, I’m going to give it 110 percent, which means I
might get on a team, which means there might be bigger and better things down
the road,’” Jeremiah said. “She said, ‘I
know, that’s why I want you to do it.’”
Today, five years after their ordeal, Ashley and Jeremiah
have a new normal, one they feel they can build on for the future. For Ashley,
who stumbled through the doorway so many years ago, she is now the one who
steadies her family when they falter.
She now calls out to make sure they are OK
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