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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - He was a young Air Force officer
healing from a recent trauma and she was a dedicated single mother
of two. Whether it was friends or fate that first brought them
together, neither would have suspected that their chance meeting in
Florida would be the key to his recovery.
Their introduction
to each other was unlikely – not due to the events of the day they
met, but of one roughly six months earlier, when Capt. Mitch Kieffer
lay in a hospital bed in Iraq about to be medically evacuated to the
states. He was suffering from injuries sustained after an improvised
explosive device passed through his lightly armored SUV and damaged
not only his body but also his mind.
Mitch said Ana Maria
deserves credit for much of his continual improvement. It is also
with her support that he is currently defending the title of
“Ultimate Champion,” a title he earned at the 2013 Warrior Games, a
Paralympic-styled event.
After his convoy was attacked, Mitch
entered into a world of pain. His head hurt constantly and he began
to realize the manner and speed with which he had previously
communicated had changed due to a traumatic brain injury.
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Capt. Mitch Kieffer and his family
enjoy a moment together after his big finish in the Warrior Games
cycling competition Sept. 29, 2014, at Fort Carson, Colo. Despite
the downpour of rain, his wife and two daughters stayed by the
course to watch as Kieffer competed and placed second in his cycling
category. Kieffer is an operations research analyst at Langley Air
Force Base, Va. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Jette Carr)
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“My cognitive processing speed was really slow,” he said.
“By the time someone was saying something to me and I was
breaking down the message and figuring out what I thought of
it and how to respond, the moment had passed. So I became
pretty quiet because I just couldn't keep up with the speed
of conversations.”
Mitch said he was cognizant of his
mental impairment. As a math major who enjoyed analytics, he
was terrified by his new reality and the possibility of a
worst case scenario – that his struggle could be permanent
and his previous mental capacity was forever lost.
“That was the scary thing, because I couldn't think,” he
said. “I was trying, but nothing came to my head and I was
pretty worried and I didn't have much hope. As time went on,
however, I started to notice I could pick things up a little
quicker and still learn. It gave me more willpower to push
harder.”
But Mitch admits it was his new family and
the need to learn a new language that turned the tide on his
learning process.
“It wasn't until I met my future
wife and my lovely two daughters now, that I actually
started learning or speaking Spanish. They are from Peru
originally, and that was just the mental workout I needed to
help build the connections [in my brain] that I'd kind of
broken.”
While the couple was dating, they took a
trip to Peru to visit with Ana Maria's family. Mitch said
that at the time he didn't know a “lick of Spanish,” but
afterward, he was inspired to pick it up. He began to use a
combination of Rosetta Stone, the English-Spanish dictionary
and cassette tapes during his drive to and from work to
learn Spanish.
Ana Maria believes it made all the
difference in the world.
“I noticed that he just
started picking [the language] up fast, to the point that
now he can -- it's not 100 percent, but I would say that
it's 90 percent -- that he can communicate with my family,”
Ana Maria said, adding that she saw it also helped with his
memory.
Ana Maria said Mitch's struggles and setbacks
weren't apparent early in their relationship and she thought
he was just a regular guy. She had never heard the terms TBI
or PTSD.
“He came to me and told me, ‘hey this is
what I have,' and to me it was like, okay, just get it over
with. Don't worry stressing about it; you understand
everybody has stress in their life ... he's like, ‘no, this is
something different.' So he gave me a couple websites and I
just started looking and researching and reading material
and then talking to other people.”
The PTSD
manifested in Mitch's life months after the TBI and added a
new challenge to the relationship. Ana Maria started to see
markers of the disease after they moved in together. Mitch
was in school working on his master's degree in operations
research at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio,
and they had started to plan their wedding. Stress was high.
“You fight with your spouse or your boyfriend, but the
fights that you have with people with PTSD or TBI; it's
different,” Ana Maria said. “It's a different concept, so
that's when I [started to] notice ... When I said something to
him that would not be mean [to others], but to him was such
a big deal, it was a little confusing.”
The
relationship had strains, but Ana Maria said she has never
changed her mind about marrying Mitch. She made a commitment
to take the good with the bad.
After his diagnosis,
both began to educate themselves and are learning how to
cope with PTSD, each in their own way. For Ana Maria, she
said patience and understanding are two key elements. In a
given situation, she tries to take a moment to recognize if
Mitch is talking or acting a certain way because of the
influence of PTSD before she reacts.
Through their
trials, Mitch and Ana Maria still maintain that newlywed
spirit. She sees in him a driven, loving husband and a great
father; and Mitch never lost that feeling he got the first
time he laid eyes on her.
“To me it was like love at
first sight; for her, she tells me that she thinks I was a
loser,” he said teasing his wife. “I continue to tell the
story that, no, she was smitten the first day that she saw
me.
“It was just the right fit. I wasn't looking for
anything. I was [working through issues] and hurting quite a
bit, [but ultimately,] there was nothing I could do. I was
just hit by the love truck,” he chuckled.
Ultimately,
their marriage is like any other. It takes effort and
patience to make it work. Though they have additional battle
scars to contend with, Mitch and Ana Maria said they will
continue to face recovery head-on together.
By U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Jette Carr
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2014
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