The Surgery Money She Spent Instead

I have carried people heavier than myself across open ground while someone was shooting at both of us, and I never once stopped to ask whether my arms could do it. You do not ask. You just find out they can. That is most of what eight years as an Army combat medic teaches you, that the body will do what it has to do if you refuse to give it permission to quit. I thought I understood exactly what my limits were, right up until the afternoon I stood in my mother’s kitchen in Larkspur, Nebraska, and watched her slide a bank statement across the table like she was dealing a card, and I understood that the only thing I had never trained for was this particular kind of cruelty, the kind that comes from someone who used to sing you to sleep.

My name is Nicole. I am thirty years old. I spent two deployments to Afghanistan as a 68 Whisker, a combat medic, attached first to a cavalry troop and later to a forward surgical team, and in my second deployment a piece of an IED casing opened up my left hip in a way that no amount of physical therapy at the VA was ever going to fully close. I do not say that for sympathy. I say it because it matters for what happened next, and because my mother, Brenda, spent a year treating that injury like it was a costume I put on when I wanted attention.

The Account I Never Closed

Before my first deployment, when I was twenty-two and certain nothing would ever happen to me, I did the responsible thing the Army tells every soldier to do. I opened a joint account back home, in case something went wrong overseas and someone needed to pay my rent or my car note without waiting on a probate court. I added my mother’s name to it because she was the only parent I had left, my father having passed when I was nineteen, and because at twenty-two you cannot picture a version of your mother who would ever need watching.

I never closed that account. Eight years, two deployments, one medical board, and a slow, grinding exit from active duty, and that joint account sat there the whole time like an old scar nobody thought about anymore. I used it for exactly one thing after I came home for good: I started feeding every spare dollar into it toward a number I had been given by a surgeon in Omaha named Dr. Felder, a number that represented the difference between walking normally again and walking the way I walk now, which is carefully, and with a list to the left that I have learned to disguise in front of strangers.