Showing posts with label Mologne House. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mologne House. Show all posts

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Music to the ears of wounded veterans recuperating at Walter Reed

Trio Galilei: Music to the ears of wounded veterans recuperating at Walter Reed
Washington Post
By Rebecca Ritzel
December 20 2013

Lt. Col. Samantha Nerove, U.S. Army, retired, remembers the day she started recovering from PTSD as the same day she stopped and listened to the music. Since being airlifted out of Iraq in September 2008 with a badly mangled ankle and severe psychological distress from close-range mortar shellings, she’d been living at Mologne House, a retrofitted hotel on the grounds of what was then the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Northwest D.C.

Two months into Nerove’s stay, she noticed that every Friday at lunchtime, a trio of musicians — playing a harp, guitar and something that looked like a cello — had started performing in the Mologne House lobby. They developed quite a fan base: The sofas in the lobby were filled with wounded patients, their weary relatives and mesmerized children who wanted to take turns playing a spare harp. If the musicians were between songs, they’d always smile warmly at Nerove, say hello and urge her to join them.
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Sunday, March 16, 2008

The story behind the reporting on Walter Reed

March 15, 2008...2:29 pm
‘Creating An Investigative Narrative’
I’m here at the Nieman narrative journalism conference in Boston, sitting in on this morning’s keynote speech, “Creating An Investigative Narrative,” with Washington Post writers Anne Hull and Dana Priest. They are explaining the story behind their award winning Walter Reed series. It’s my first time blogging live from a conference, so bear with me. Feedback is welcome.

Some notes from their talk:

Hull and Priest focused on the army’s neglect and the treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital. Neither of them were prepared for the reaction, they said. They received hundreds of e-mails in response to the series.

“For the first time in my life I realized the true power we have as journalists to create change.” –Anne
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Sunday, March 9, 2008

Walter Reed Red Tape And Veterans Care

Red tape blocks returning vets care
PETER URBAN purban@ctpost.com

Article Last Updated: 03/09/2008 12:33:57 AM EST


WASHINGTON — In the year that has passed since Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon told Congress of the neglect he suffered at Walter Reed Medical Center, the Army's premier hospital has begun to turn around.
"One of the first things they implemented was the Warrior Transition Unit. That is probably one of the best moves they ever could have made," Shannon said.

The unit provides wounded soldiers with a direct point of contact to help manage their recovery as they pass through the hospital and aftercare. Wounded soldiers now don't have to worry as much that they will be lost in the bureaucracy as he was when he arrived at Walter Reed in November 2004, said Shannon, 44.

"Anyone like me, an individual patient, has a lot more access to people to ask questions of those who have the responsibility to get things done," he said.

Five days after suffering a gunshot wound to the head that cost him an eye, Shannon was handed a photocopied map of Walter Reed's campus and directed to its outpatient Mologne House.

"I was extremely disoriented and wandered around while looking for someone to direct me to the Mologne House. Eventually, I found it. I had been given a couple of weeks' appointments and some other paperwork upon leaving Ward 58, and I went to all my appointments during that time," he told a Congressional panel last year. "After these appointments, I sat in my room for another couple of weeks wondering when someone would contact me about my continuing medical care.
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http://www.connpost.com/localnews/ci_8507168

Monday, October 15, 2007

Military kids at Walter Reed find place to play

WALTER REED PLAYGROUND PROJECT
In a Place of Pain and Recovery, Room to Romp

By Delphine Schrank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 15, 2007; Page B03

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center yesterday, the children came out to play.

About a half-dozen youngsters poured onto a rectangle of squishy green turf, hopped onto swings and scrambled over a jungle gym, minutes after a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new playground. Tucked behind Mologne House, a 199-room hotel for outpatients and their families, it is a burst of primary colors amid the brick-and-concrete solemnity of the center where wounded warriors learn to walk on prosthetic limbs or cope again with the trials of everyday life.

Toddlers to teens can spend months living in Mologne along with their injured parents, but until now they have had few outlets for their stress. About 40 children live there, said General Manager Peter A. Anderson, but many more visit when school is out.

The alternative to the outdoor playground had been a makeshift play area of toys crammed against the stairs in the building lobby.

Another option had been staring at the fish in the pond behind Mologne. "My daughter was actually counting the fish," recalled Staff Sgt. Renee Deville, who has post-traumatic stress disorder and limited arm motion from a mortar attack in Iraq. Yesterday she sat on a sun-drenched wall rimming the playground, watching daughters Janee, 4, and Amani, 9, hard at play.

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