Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Razor Shark
Steve was drafted after September 11 and deployed to Iraq in 2005, where he was hit in the neck with mortar fragments and conditioned to simply “shake it off.” When he returned home on leave, he began having trouble sleeping, headaches and vision problems, fatigue, weight loss and confusion.
With three young children at home, he continued his job as a firefighter while Mary taught school. She started noticing changes; he would huff at the children, and sometimes she would find him hiding under blankets and talking about “people in black.” He failed a cognitive test and eventually his coworkers told her he had anger problems, which led to the loss of his job.
“After a while I got fed up with it,” Mary says. “Our children were older and they had developed so many problems: drug use, cutting, suicide attempts. Steve’s mood was so bad that I couldn’t tell him any of this. While our son was being arrested at home for drug charges, he sat in the living room, completely checked out, changing the channel. Steve didn’t understand what was happening.”
“How do we provide emotional support to caregivers dealing with cognitive disorders?” Maria wonders. “I don’t want anyone telling me to put the damn oxygen mask on. I miss the relationship with the person I married. It’s such a fine line between expressing what I need and disrupting the wagon and dealing with the consequences of what I need.”
The impossibility of self-care
Katie Wilson*, 50, from Richmond, Virginia, met her husband Bill* when they were both in the military. He had survived a penetrating shrapnel wound to the skull while in Iraq when they started dating, but thought he was functioning well. She noticed that Bill was drinking more than he should, having nightmares, and falling behind on bills, but she was in love. After they got married and lived together, it became clear that he needed more care.
“In 2003, people weren’t prepared for brain injuries,” Katie recalls. “I decided not to re-enlist so that I could help him, and I spent our marriage devoting a lot of energy to him: appointments, care, dealing with his deep depression, erratic moods, anger and suicidality. An AARP survey found that 49 percent of experienced caregivers under the age of 60 spend more than 20 hours per week providing care.
‘I knew I couldn’t be his wife And his mother, and I was planning to divorce him before he agreed to give up alcohol, take a mood stabilizer, and let me take over the finances because of his reckless spending,” Katie explains. “But once some of the pressure was off, I realized: I’m not okay. I am exhausted and functioning from compartmentalization and dissociation, constantly crouching against the possibility of something happening. The police have been to our home more than once because of violent outbursts.”
At one point Bill put a gun to her head; another time, she took her phone, locked her in the basement and sent horrible messages through her social media account.
“Interpersonal violence in caregiving situations is something we don’t talk about,” says Katie. ‘I carry with me the chronic trauma of walking on eggshells, always fearing that if I don’t do the right thing it will confuse him. And if I’m not hypervigilant, he’ll kill himself. Bill’s risk of early dementia due to injury is in me all the time. It is the fear of the future; What can we do and what are we going to do?”
Bill and Katie have tried couples therapy without much success. Katie recently quit her job to give herself the space to invest in her own well-being. “I need to spend time on myself first,” she says, “and then relationship therapy might be more productive. With enough therapy, I can hopefully let go of some of the anger and sadness about what my life could have been like.”