I volunteer at 2 museums, The South Carolina Cotton Museum, (
www.sccotton.org) and next door to it is The Lee County Veteran's Museum, we just opened it, officially, on Memorial Day. We've had an amazing amount of community support getting the Military Museum up and running. We've got weapons, uniforms, and personal memorabilia, from all the wars, and most conflicts that the US has been involved in from Revolutionary war, to the War of Northern Aggression, AKA Civil War, to the present time.
I also volunteer at the VA hospital in Columbia, SC, I work with veterans trying to get connected with MyHealthEvet, a online service that allows the vets to do most anything they might require, as far as their health is concerned, they can order their prescriptions, send a message to any of their health care providers, download their lab results, doctors notes, prior treatments anywhere they've been treated, even from different VA facilities. They can also track their situations as far as disability claims, dates of upcoming appointments, the whole gamut of the Veteran's Affairs system.
I'm also a co-facilitator for a PTSD peer counseling group, military members are twice as likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder in their career, average overall, than their civilian counterparts. Although I've never been able to find much as far as civilian counterparts that have faced the things the American serviceman, or woman, have faced on a daily basis, so I'm not sure where those numbers have come from.
Additionally, my wife has multiple myeloma, (a type of blood cancer that effects bones), she was diagnosed just about a year ago the end of this month. 3 months later, they did another MRI and found one of her cervical vertebrae had been affected as well. It had eaten it's way through the back part of her vertebrae, and the piece was totally separated, had she not found out about the hip, she may not have found out about her vertebrae until it had sheared her spinal cord. So in a very real way her broken hip was a true miracle from God that prevented her from being paralyzed. She also was diagnosed about 15 years ago with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis, so in addition to all my volunteer positions, I'm also a home health nurse full time.
Other than that I get to ride my :spyder2:, which we bought because my wife was no longer able to get out of the sidecar, my other bike, and she doesn't have any problem getting on or off my RT. South Carolina is normally the perfect environment for motorcycle riding, I've been living down here 15 years, and haven't ridden at least sometime in every month of the year. We've had so much rain, I'm afraid we may have to trade my sidecar rig for a Seadoo. :gaah:
Doc