HAMPTON
Bethany Rafferty didn’t want to spend Thursday morning outside the Veterans Administration Medical Center protesting. But there she stood, across from the VA next to an I-64 on-ramp, wearing a homemade sign, with her 4-year-old son holding a U.S. flag and her 2-year-old daughter holding a sign.
“I’ve never protested anything in my life,” Rafferty said, “but what else am I supposed to do?”
Rafferty has become the caretaker of John Peters, a 78-year-old Korean War veteran and former Army sniper who has had his legs amputated and who desperately needs a new wheelchair.
Spokeswoman Sheila Bailey said the medical center is working on getting Peters mobile again. A loaner wheelchair was scheduled for delivery to Peters on Thursday and the VA will try to repair his old one.
“We work really hard to try to resolve these situations when they come up,” Bailey said. “Please understand that we have been trying for two days to work with the veteran.”
For Rafferty, the fix was taking too long, she said.
She and Peters had been at the VA to see his doctor three weeks ago, she said, and when the doctor saw his stitched-together wheelchair, he signed off on a new one. For whatever reason, that didn’t happen – at least as of Thursday morning.
“It was stuck together with electric tape and Gorilla glue,” Rafferty said of the chair. “I’ve been splicing wires on it and trying to charge it with car batteries.”
Known as “Capt. John” from his days of piloting a tugboat in New York, Peters had sat at a desk inside the Greenbrier YMCA for years, making paintings of the Great Bridge Locks, New England churches, a tug on the Manhattan River. Rafferty, a yoga instructor there, befriended Peters, then became his caretaker.
For the past few weeks, that’s been a 24-hour-a-day job. Rafferty moved Peters in with her family after his wheelchair stopped working. Without it, he needs her to take a bath, get in and out of bed, use the bathroom, take insulin, even get a drink of water to wash down his medications.
Maybe the VA would have provided a wheelchair on Thursday without the protest, but Rafferty said making her point had more than one purpose.
“We’re not trying to cause any trouble or say anyone at the VA is horrible. It’s a big, big bureaucracy,” she said. “I also wanted to teach my children about standing up for veterans.”
Lon Wagner, (757) 446-2341, Lon.Wagner@pilotonline.com
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Unbelievable
It is just unbelievable the man's situation has come to this. Bravo to the woman for standing up for the man! You're going to try and tell me that in that huge complex they don't have a spare wheel chair around they could even loan the guy? Our government can afford $400 hammers and pay raises for our representatives, but they can't come up with wheel chairs and/or proper care for our vets. Sure does say a lot about the state of things . . .
The irony
That there are probably more than a few families in Tidewater with a wheelchair collecting dust in the garage right now and donating it was one of those "round tuit" projects.
request
I'm requesting a follow-up story from the Va. Pilot on this one! I hope he received his wheelchair by this afternoon. How sad.
Good for her!
It shouldn't have taken 3 weeks to get the man a new wheelchair. Once the press gets involved, things seem to start moving along, don't they?
Hey Bethany...
...Nameste'...Budda is smiling!!!
Good Job
Good job young lady. From what this reads, you have taken a deserving stranger into your home, a noble action not many would do. I commend you for that. It's a shame it really does have to come to the point of protesting to get something accomplished in our red-tape gov't, but at least you got some attention on the matter.