A one-woman help line

San Diego Union, Monday, April 17, 2006
Steve Liewer, Union-Tribune Staff Writer

That August afternoon 20 months ago would be the last time Tonia Sargent let herself feel helpless. She quietly broke the news to her two daughters, who were 15 and 17. Then she wiped away her tears, marched into the living room and gave instructions to the Marine wives already gathering to comfort her.

Find a chaplain, she asked one. Wash the dishes, she suggested to another.

“I didn't want to panic. I just tried to control everything,” Tonia said.

She hasn't stopped taking control since. While nursing her brain-injured husband through a long recovery, she ran head-on into a military medical system she found to be overwhelmed by the crush of severely injured troops.

Tonia, 37, hid her personal pain behind a wall of activity, working the phones and writing e-mails from her husband's bedside. She has put in hundreds of volunteer hours for military charities, raising millions of dollars while literally writing the book on support services for families of injured military service personnel.

On Wednesday, Tonia and Kenny – who has largely recovered from his injuries – will help dedicate a new Fisher House in Palo Alto, a temporary residence for military personnel, retirees and their families when they need to be close to a Veterans Affairs or military hospital far from home.

The 21-suite, $5 million home has gone from hope to reality largely through the force of Tonia's Type A personality, said Kerri Childress, a spokeswoman for the VA Palo Alto Health Care System.

“She's like the fireplug. She's the one who ignites the interest of other people,” Childress said. “Advocating for her own family, she advocates for a lot of other families, too.”

Confronting an ordeal

The Sargents arrived at Camp Pendleton in May 2002, 15 years into Kenny's Marine Corps career. The following January, he shipped out to Kuwait with his unit. Two months later, Kenny moved into Iraq with the 1st Marine Division.

Tonia became a key volunteer at Camp Pendleton. That's a spouse who comforts and sends information to other Marine families. She added those tasks to her two paid jobs, at a YMCA and as an aerobics instructor, which already totaled 65 hours per week. She and her daughters, Tasha and Alishia, avoided the TV news as much as possible, trying to keep up a “normal” life.

“You don't shed tears,” she said. “You put on that wife face, and you're strong.”

Kenny came home in late summer 2003 exhausted. Six months later, he was back in Iraq for a second tour of duty.

“I had an uneasy feeling from the beginning, but I never complained,” Tonia said.

Kenny was traveling in a convoy near Najaf on Aug. 5, 2004, when his vehicle was ambushed. A ricocheting bullet struck him below the right eye, exited near his left ear and damaged the front of his brain. He barely survived.

Tonia flew to Washington, D.C., where Kenny had been airlifted to Bethesda Naval Hospital.She left their daughters home alone, asking neighbors to look in on them. She nearly collapsed after seeing Kenny in the intensive-care unit, broken, unconscious, his body invaded with tubes.

“I didn't even recognize him,” Tonia recalled. “I said, 'Squeeze my hand if you know who I am.' ”

He squeezed.

She moved into Kenny's hospital room and took charge. She learned all of his medications and when he needed them. She charted every ounce of fluid that went in or out of him and hung the records on the door for his nurses.

Tonia rarely left his bedside, showering him, shaving him, taking him to the bathroom.

“I had everything I needed, supportwise, there,” she said.

Kenny drifted out of danger, but he needed rehabilitative help to rebuild his life. After two months, the Sargents flew to Palo Alto, where the Department of Veterans Affairs has one of four regional centers for brain-injured veterans.

After weeks of giving Kenny round-the-clock care in Bethesda, Tonia only could see him during limited visiting hours. His caregivers suggested she go home and pretend he was deployed.

“I was told by the VA, this is not your rehab, this is his rehab. You're too involved,” Tonia recalled. “I went ballistic. I said, 'I'm not a visitor. I'm his wife!' ”

Tireless force

No one could tell Tonia where to find out what assistance she and Kenny could get. Perched in Palo Alto, she had no access to phones or e-mail.

Like most families supporting loved ones in the hospital, she couldn't afford $100 or more a night for a hotel. The only temporary lodging the hospital could offer was a shared room for which she had to put her name on a standby list each day.

“Every day, Tonia didn't know where she was going to stay that night,” Childress said. “Taking care of families was a new issue for the VA.”

So Tonia got to work.

First she got her husband's care in order. She e-mailed regular status reports to all of his doctors, case managers, therapists and his command. She learned to brief medical experts in their own jargon.

During her spare time, Tonia volunteered at the hospital and with other military support organizations, including the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund (which she has promoted on Roger Hedgecock's radio show in San Diego), www.soldierfund.org and Operation Homefront.

She met with Childress to find out why the Palo Alto VA hospital lacked a Fisher House. The San Diego Naval Hospital in Balboa Park has had one since 1992.

Childress told her the Fisher House Foundation had approved construction, but the hospital needed to raise more than $2 million itself. By law, the hospital couldn't use tax money for the project.

“I said, 'OK, Tonia, put your money where your mouth is,' ” Childress recalled. “She said, 'I'm in. Tell me what I need to do.' ”

Tonia became the human face of the fundraising drive. Again and again, she told the story of Kenny's injury, the family's dilemma and the teenagers caring for themselves at home so she could stay at her husband's side.

She called U.S. senators and asked them for cash. She visited with the Blue Star Moms, a club composed of mothers with sons or daughters serving in combat. Cadence Design Systems Inc., a Silicon Valley firm, agreed to donate more than $1 million from its annual bowling fundraiser. A businessman donated about $175,000 to pay for military families to stay at hotels until the Fisher House opens.

“Tonia was open and shared that pain with the world,” Childress said. “When they heard her story, honest to goodness, the pockets of the Bay Area just opened up.”

A year and a half after Tonia jump-started the fundraising, the Fisher House will open this week. Childress said such a drive typically takes five years.

Filling the cracks

Using her networking skills, Tonia doggedly figured out how to get help for her family from the maze of military, medical and veterans organizations, whose efforts she found well-intentioned but uncoordinated. /p>

In the process, she has become a one-woman help line for other injured veterans and their families.

Lt. Col. Alan Burghard, 47, of Westminster is a Marine Corps reservist whosuffered a head injury in Iraq. Burghard had a hard time getting appointments, finding out about assistance and getting doctors to talk to one another until he met Tonia in Palo Alto.

“The system is overwhelmed,” Burghard said. “We didn't know what the puzzle looked like. She's started to pull the pieces together, here and there.”

The hard work is not without its toll. Tonia acknowledges the activity is in part a coping mechanism to block out her anger and pain..

“I feel responsible for so many, and I have nothing left to give of myself to myself,” she wrote in an e-mail to a friend in January.

Diana Hartman, a Marine wife and close friend of Tonia's, said she is one of the few people who has seen her cry.

“There is a precious, weeping and exhausted person behind that pleasant, organized and determined smile,” Hartman wrote in an e-mail from her home in Germany. “She'll never knock anyone down, she'll just tell them why and show them how to get the hell out of her way.”

Now the Sargents are back home at Camp Pendleton, except when Kenny returns to Palo Alto for follow-up care.

His left side remains partially paralyzed, and his memory is slower than before. Now promoted to master sergeant, he is well enough to pull on his uniform and spend time with his Marines twice a week. His physical therapy continues, and he plans to stay in the Marine Corps as long as he can..

It hurts Kenny that his injured brain has blotted out the memory of so much of what Tonia did to help him. But he said he's not surprised by her actions; she has had a take-charge personality ever since they got married as high school sweethearts in Kearns, Utah, 19 years ago.

“I call her my nurse, my doctor, my wife, my everything,” he said.

Tonia's plate is as full as ever. She wants to change the way the military handles injured military service personnel. She is working on a creating a “survival binder” to help families of the injured navigate the bureaucracies.

She also is pushing for a long list of reforms, from financial aid to replacing lost income while a spouse cares for an injured veteran, to plane tickets and phone cards so families can travel easily to the veteran's bedside.

“I used to try and avoid the cracks in the system. Now I try to fill them,” Tonia said. “It's my responsibility. I have to leave these steppingstones along the way.”

She'll paste on her smile, make another phone call and save her tears until she is alone.