Beckie99

I want to re-assure you that there are so many of us veterans out there just like you. The only difference is our level of understanding Gulf War Illness and how it dictates EVERYTHING else in your life.

I'm so sorry it cost you your marriage. It almost cost me mine, even though he and I both understood what is going on. The depression itself is debilitating and everlasting. OVERWHELMING! at times. But you must understand that depression is not directly causing your malaise or inability to go to work. The depression is caused by very real pathogens (diseases, manmade or weaponized), which in turn cause malaise or inability to function in society.

If you can read up on some of my other replies to postings within this website, I think you'll find a way to get some medical treatment. Sadly enough, you can kiss your dreams of a career good-bye. Once you've started on the treadmill of running through jobs like I have, you have to get really creative just to find another. I am a laid-off telecommunications paralegal with a lot of home medical training (that's three different career fields in most employers' eyes).

I've been out of work for more than a year. My health will not permit me to venture into fields that require physical exertion, as I did when I was a soldier.

I don't know what your military career was like. If you don't have much active time in, it will be rough. But if you can clinically prove that your debilitation is caused by your service, you can get some help through the V.A.

I think the best advice I can give you is to rely on family members. Is your wife really gone? Or was that just an answer to a short-term problem? Are your parents interested in your lack of self-confidence? Have they read about Gulf War Illness? Do you keep in touch with the people you served with?

Do you have a doctor? Do you know a nurse or lab tech? Do you know service members who could direct you to someone outside the V.A. who would listen to your stories about agonizing pain upon waking that keeps you from moving upward and onward? Or agonizing pain that keeps you from getting any refreshing sleep? Maybe chest pains and shortness of breath? Pain in your internal organs? Headaches that make you think you could easily swallow a bottle of aspirin without any relief in sight? Nose drips or nose bleeds that make you feel like the first day of a really bad flu-bug? A feeling like somebody hooked the back of your eyeballs and is trying to suck them through the back of your head? Sunken "raccoon" eyes? The feeling that you got in a fist fight the night before? The feeling that you got rotten, stinking drunk the night before, but had not even a drop to drink? Swollen throat and sore salivary or lymph glands? A feeling that you spent the entire night in a cigar bar, even though you don't smoke and never go to the bars at all? Have you had chronic infections: urinary, upper respiratory, kidney, ear, eye, skin rashes?

I'd love to hear back from you. Action is the best remedy for depression. Talking about it is the first step into action. And it's the best way to get somebody who can help you into your life. And it's hard! Take it from a mid-40s soldier with an early 30s face and body, but a mind and musco-skeletal system that feels 80. I guess the hitch in my get-along is about 60-ish.