Tuesday is Veterans Day, and doctors say many in the military suffer from a variety of lingering health issues, including brain injuries.<\/p>\n
A rehabilitation center in Willow Grove, Montgomery County, is focused on comprehensive care for veterans and first responders with traumatic brain injuries.<\/p>\n
Scott Edgell said Jefferson’s MossRehab Institute for Brain Health helped restore his life. He’s now back at the center helping others.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the MossRehab Institute for Brain Health, veterans and first responders with brain injuries come for an intense three-week program.<\/p>\n
“There is help,” Edgell said. “There’s hope, and there’s happiness, and there are the three things I had none of them when I walked in that door.”<\/p>\n
Edgell’s brain injury happened back in 1989 when he was in the Army.<\/p>\n
“We were doing a military training exercise in Fort Riley, Kansas, and the tanker I was riding in went into a ditch, and the hatch swung shut and hit me right in the backside of my head,” he said.<\/p>\n
Scott said he recovered from the concussion and went on to become an electronics engineer. Decades later, he started getting symptoms again.<\/p>\n
“It was almost like I just had my accident, you know, dizzy, very, very dizzy, balance issues,” he said. “I have a lot of visual problems.”<\/p>\n
Edgell said he was also overwhelmed with anxiety and depression.<\/p>\n
“I was broken and down and out when I walked in the door,” he said.<\/p>\n
Art therapy is among many of the many treatments he received, along with physical and cognitive therapy.<\/p>\n
“They gave me the ability to rebuild my life and get my life back,” Edgell said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Operations director Kate O’Rourke said masks made during art therapy give the patients a way to express feelings they might not be able to articulate.<\/p>\n
All the treatments are tailored specifically for unique issues faced by first responders with brain injuries.<\/p>\n
\u00a0“It’s been life-transforming for so many, and as well as their families,” O’Rourke said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Edgell’s therapy also included getting a service dog \u2014 Lars.<\/p>\n
“He has turned my life around,” he said. “It is the biggest blessing I’ve ever probably been given next to this program.”<\/p>\n
Now, he’s dedicated to helping others learn how to overcome brain injuries.<\/p>\n
MossRehab’s Institute is one of only six federally funded traumatic brain injury centers dedicated to first responders.<\/p>\n
\n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tuesday is Veterans Day, and doctors say many in the military suffer from a variety of lingering health…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[200,28,30,29,2349,15041],"class_list":["post-30594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-montgomery-county","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-veterans","tag-veterans-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}