SYNOPSIS:
As a mother and 20-year military veteran caregiver, Naomi Elie shares the stages of the onset of schizophrenia encountered by young Navy Corpsman London Elie while on active-duty at Balboa Navy Medical Center in San Diego, California. As Corpsman Elie enthusiastically assumes his military career role at Balboa, he becomes debilitated by a dysfunctional brain being renovated by mental illness via a jack hammer power tool emitting stress. Unable to explain to his young wife and Navy superiors the negative commentary assaulting his thoughts, the frightful visions of various species of insects crawling outside and inside his body, the paranormal figures plaguing his sight, and inanimate objects such as clocks communicating with him, Corpsman Elie's behavior is mistakenly defined as defiance and insubordination by Navy superiors.
Consequently, instead of prescribing mental healthcare for the young corpsman, the U. S. Navy strategically commences building a legal file against him which fanned the flames of mental illness, suffering, and punishment. When Naomi meets with her son's superiors in Balboa's Legal Department requesting help, they essentially confirm that the military can force soldiers to kill but cannot force them to remain fit for duty via mental healthcare, all an egregious ploy to keep medical documentation out of a soldier's military records to prevent future benefits for active-duty injuries.
Finally discharged as a broken and mentally unfit veteran, London finds he is absent his beautiful wife who could not shoulder the traumatic weight of a mentally ill husband and two infant/toddler sons. Thus, he lands into the arms of a mother who is deployed to seek quality medical help for a son whose mind and body are impregnated with auditory and visual hallucinations, tics, impaired judgment, restlessness, anger, paranoia, social isolation and other vast debilitation. On a journey into the unknown, Naomi and her son are introduced to the adversarial, sometimes lethal, Veterans Affairs healthcare and benefits system - a remnant of the heavy weight of freedom strategically bent on defrauding veterans of benefits and compensation for their injuries received during active-duty military service.
While armed with prayer, Naomi sought to supplement her weaponry with anti-psychotic medications for London in order to retrieve the wonderful son she raised into manhood. However, the more Naomi grasped for the son who once was, the more her downward spiral and immersion into a ruthless healthcare and benefits system of darkness and loss took her.
Advocating within a system whose belly is filled with the rotten smell of decades old decayed injustice, Naomi finds herself crippled and limping from the blows of an agency that employs doctors who minimize injuries to prevent veterans from securing just and fair ratings for benefits; an agency that buries suicide attempts by veterans and dismisses said attempts as being the veteran's non-medical problem when determining ratings; an agency that forum shops for physicians who will agree with their wrong claims assessments in order to produce unjust ratings; an agency that purges appeal documents from the records of veterans and forces them to take ratings deals under the table; an agency that relishes in the fact that mentally ill veterans cannot maneuver its bureaucratic system, thereby, inducing discriminatory practices in awarding benefits; and an agency that resents caregivers for veterans and strategically strives to deny eligibility via unjust assessments based on mentally ill veterans wearing "good clothes" to his/her medical appointments, veterans being capable of "cutting a steak with a knife," "carrying a clothes basket to the washing machine," and "capable of walking up four steps on a flight of stairs."
Join Naomi and London Elie as they both struggle to lift a veteran's honor, only to find a conspiracy of injustice!
show more
