Dear Honor and Courage Foundation, First, I would like to say thank you to all involved with your foundation.  When I didn’t know where to turn for help with my veteran son, Heather was there.  Heather is our angel who gave my son his life back and we will forever be grateful to her and your foundation.  I would like to share with you a bit of background about my very special son.  He joined the Army in 2010 at 19 years of age.  As a child and young adult, he was funny, smart, handsome, and athletic.  As the wife of a retired Army vet, I was very proud that my son decided to serve our great country.  I gave the country my son and was given back a very broken and distant man who did not feel deserving of life itself.  He was injured in Afghanistan in 2011 yet continued to stay to fulfill his deployment. When he returned, I saw in his eyes….death.  Death of the gregarious son I once knew.  He once told me he knew God would punish him for what he had to do and he knew he would never have a son.  My heart was broken.  Heather put me in touch with a very special veteran, Andrew Smith, who spoke for hours with me to help me understand my son better and to teach me how to help him move forward.   That was in 2016.  Since then, my son has often wanted to end his life.  He has everything going for him…a beautiful wife and now a one year old son yet, he was still feeling undeserving of all of it.  He suffers from severe hyper vigilance and PTS.  On one of my recent visits with he and his family, he was speaking of suicide.  It was the day I was heading back home and was so unsure of how to help him this time.  I contacted Heather with my plea for help.  It was then that I learned for the first time about the Stellate Ganglion block and that this is something that she has seen help other vets.  I immediately contacted my daughter in law and we started working on him.  He agreed he needed help and because of your generosity, the arrangements were made for him to go to the Stellate Institute in Annapolis.  Last week, my son met with Dr. Lynch and began his treatments.  He and his wife said they were so impressed with the doctor, how caring and compassionate he was, how he talked my son through the entire process, and how he hugged them both at the end.  My son, almost immediately, felt “different”, lighter, and a bit confused by it all.  He had a lot of emotions to unpack over the course of the next few days.  Today, they called my husband and I and who we saw was our old son….no darkness in his eyes, no weight on his shoulders, and a big smile on his face.  While he is still processing the emotions, he is ever so grateful to have had this done.  In fact, he said he doesn’t understand why this isn’t used on all veterans following a deployment.  How many could have been saved, if only.  You…your foundation…and Heather saved my son.  I cannot thank you all enough.  Please, continue to offer this treatment to all veterans and please, we must scream this from the rooftops!  You save lives….you restore families and you give HOPE! 

Warmest regards,

A very grateful proud Army veteran’s momma