W: It gets him out of the house at least to where he feels like he has some self worth and it does help us with our income. I think mentally it helps him so then it helps us, except for the fact that he comes home tired, and so fatigued. It's more almost than he can handle. But, the trade off is, alright, he's exhausted and he can't hardly do things around here from the exhaustion and fatigue, but yet, he feels better about himself, and so mentally he feels better, whether his health is deteriorating or not.

............

Q: What's the attitude like at the VA overall toward Persian Gulf vets?

A: It has changed a lot since the beginning. When these problems first came up, and this is what was done in my line of duty. It was done in January of 1992. We come back in '91, right? Have trouble with the years, have trouble with days, but -- they did a line of duty and they put it down as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Doctors have to give a name to everything. Can't just say I don't know. They had to put a name to it. Well, they were finding out that, No. this really was not post traumatic stress disorder. There were too many other things that were real. There were some physical -- this was something that's physical. Yes, maybe they are having trouble with some stressors, but most of these stressors are brought on by the health problem that they are having.

W: The system was overwhelmed. They did not know how to handle all that they were getting bombarded with, as far as all these soldiers being sick. So when we first started dealing with the VA with him and the military, there was not a definite protocol set up of how they were supposed to handle the soldiers and the families. They really struggled to get a program set up to where it was the norm, and it was the policy. They would go these exams and these tests, and one doctor would handle the situation. They have one clinic set up to handle these soldiers. It was a long road. Many times, like he said when we took him to the emergency room that day, we sat for several hours before they gave him an actual examination. ..

Q: Linda, have you been sick with similar symptoms?

W: My stress level has shot up, and the doctor and I have discussed it, and -- it's something I'm going to have to deal with.... I have noticed joint aches and pains, like he experiences. Leg pains at night --Night sweats..... They come and go, like he has them. I'm starting to struggle with my memory and the thought process. The kids noticed it first. I used to be a dispatcher at a police department. I could run a radio, answer phones, deal with people, run the computer, type logs, all at the same time. I could tell you were any 20 police officers were at any given time. I can't do that now. There's no way I could go back to do that. I'm lucky if I can remember what I was doing five minutes ago. I do the same thing now that he does. I walk around and can leave from one room to the next and totally forget what I was doing, what I thinking, where I was going, what I needed to accomplish. And I know that people write this off and they say that that is normal. They go through it. Not to the degree we experience. Not -- the fatigue, I'm getting it. The exhaustion. The pure -- I just can't function anymore. I have to go lay down. I have to rest.

A: You developed the rash worse than I did.

W: Yes. I've had some rashes. We have tried different programs for Jim, because there are so many people out there trying different things medically. We tried putting him on Prozac - no, not Prozac --

A: Ritalin.

W: Ritalin. And it was terrible. We took him off before a week was over. He was absolutely non-functioning, because he has a lot of the symptoms and that was one of the protocols that we had heard somebody was trying. So we thought, well, we'll try it.

A: It was for the sleep apnea, and they thought the Ritalin would work. It took my feet out from under me --.

Q: Are you worried, you know since you seem to develop similar symptoms. Let's talk a bit about your daughters and how this is affecting your relationship with them.

A: Well, my oldest daughter has not handled it very well at all. She does not like to see daddy sick. This is a big stressor on her. She's used to seeing the old man doing things that 16 year olds do, as far a physical things. You know, doing handsprings across the front yard, and climbing all over things. Physically active. The day that she came in and found me on the floor, I couldn't get up, and I'm making jokes about it and she thought -- she saw no humor in it. She sees no humor in any of this. And she just can't stand being around it. It tears her up. Now the youngest one, she kind of has the mother hen attitude. I think I need to be taking care of daddy, and I need to do this for daddy.

Q: Did you try Dr. Garth Nicolson's protocol?

A: Yes, we did.

Q: Could you tell me a little bit about that?

A: Turned my teeth black. It made me sicker than a dog. I couldn't hardly work my job at all. When I --

W: Jim described it best as, If you hit yourself in the head with a hammer long enough, when you stop you'll feel better. So, taking the medication for a certain period of time makes you feel like you're hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. And then you stop taking it, you're bound to feel better because you're not hitting yourself with the hammer any more.

A: Yes, one the cycles where I supposed to lay off of it, for the first three days, man, I was superman. I mean, I could work all three days straight without sleep. I mean, just doing all kinds of stuff that I couldn't do before. And then -- but it was just mainly because it's just similar to walking along with a 200 pound pack on your back for a period of time. As soon as you let that 200 pound pack on your back off, suddenly you've got this -- you know, you're so much lighter, and then you can start doing this --

Q: So, what did he have you on?

A: It was an antibiotic --

W: Doxycycline.

A: Doxycycline, and it --

W: It turned his teeth grey, to the point where I was calling his dentist and asking, what we could do, what was going on, why were his teeth discoloring so horribly. So we finally figured out that it was the heavy dose of antibiotics he was on, and they were ruining his teeth. It was absolutely hysterical. I went as far as to contact Colonel Teir(ph) at Fort Van(ph) to see about following through with that protocol, because Colonel Graves had told us about this program that Nicolson was doing. We got soldiers and family members and children to come out and give blood to send to Dr. Nicolson so that he could run tests on it, and he was supposed to respond back to us and let us know what he found out. We have yet to hear anything back from him of whether he found anything with the blood, or even received it.

Q: Jim, if you believe that the cause of your health problems are due to chemicals. How is that transmissible to, say, your wife?

A: I have no idea. At first they thought it might be transmitted sexually, then there were theories that it could be transmitted through sweat. You know, any body fluids. Any body fluids whatsoever, which, I had believed the body fluids to be a possibility because my dog and I got very similar.

My dog, he got to wandering around, didn't know where he was at, couldn't hear, couldn't see. Yes, he was getting older, but he started losing his hair. And I though this is odd, and then I come to find out that the two colonels from my battalion had the same problem. Their dogs were doing the same thing. Now, we're talking about dogs that eat after us, you know, whatever leftovers we used to give to the dog, he was an American Eskimo. Yes, we have one bathroom in the house. So, I have a workshop back there, and when it's dark, well -- I'm not going to stand in line here, we'll go outside you know. Well, the dog's sitting there, he goes there too and sniffs in it and gets into it. I'm around him all the time, and suddenly he gets very ill.

W: I thought that he had thyroid problems. Yes, the dog. Because -- the symptoms he was showing with the hair loss and things like that made sense to take him to the vet and have him tested for a thyroid problem. And we took him, had blood work ran, and everything. Nothing showed. Everything was fine. And the only other recourse was to possibly send him to Purdue University and have some series of serious tests ran on him, and I was like, that's silly. We're not going to get any answers. It's obvious, I mean after talking with the two other colonels and what they went through with their dogs, and what I saw seeing with this dog develop, who'd been a perfectly healthy and normal and average dog, it was plain that his body was deteriorating and his health was deteriorating, like Jim's was. It finally came to a point where we just had to put him to sleep.