Melissa Hooppaw looks out a window in her basement workshop while working on jewelry at her Locust Grove home. Hooppaw is being discharged from the Navy after suffering a brain injury in an explosion during a tour in Iraq. PETER CIHELKA/THE FREE LANCE-STAR View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

Injury sparks woman's creativity WHAT'S IN A NAME?

After suffering a traumatic brain injury in Iraq, Orange County woman turns to arts as therapy and finds that the creative part of her brain is in overdrive

Date published: 3/18/2009

By CATHY DYSON

Melissa Hooppaw had an artistic side, but didn't get to show it much until an explosion changed her life.

In 2004, the Navy lieutenant was stationed at Al Asad, the second largest air base in Iraq. It was her first deployment, and the corpsman--the Navy's version of an Army medic--had heard things were pretty quiet along this stretch of the Euphrates River.

That wasn't the case.

The base was hit regularly by rocket-propelled grenades. One fall evening, a mortar landed a few hundred feet from her quarters, causing "the loudest noise I ever heard in my life," she said.

She was knocked unconscious. When she woke up, her head was in a fog, her ears rang and people seemed to move in slow motion.

When somebody yelled, "Doc," she scrambled for her medical bag and tended to the wounded throughout the night.

She didn't give the blast much thought until her second deployment to Iraq in 2006, when she started having seizures.

Two months before she was supposed to go home, she was tested for epilepsy, but didn't have it. She assumed she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, like many around her.

"I shrugged it off and went on with my life," she said.

She finished her duty and settled in Locust Grove with her husband, Jim, and son, Paul.

Now 37, Hooppaw took an assignment as director of public health services at Quantico Marine Corps Base.

Things got worse.

She started stuttering. She had memory lapses. She couldn't finish anything she started.

"I was having seizures four times a day," she said. "Or I'd collapse like a rag doll."

She eventually was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury--one of the signature injuries of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One in five returning vets has been exposed to blasts that affect the brain's functions, according to a 2008 study by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.

Hooppaw's injury was considered mild. A severe injury can leave a person in a coma.

She's waiting to get a medical discharge from the Navy, after 15 years of service. She can't keep a job because of her condition, and the medication she takes often leaves her impaired.

She hardly thinks the changes are mild.

There are dozens of dragonfly pins and designs in Melissa Hooppaw's Locust Grove home. She has always liked the insect for several reasons: As a public-health officer, her goal was to keep drinking water safe, and dragonflies are signs of clean water. In some cultures, they're also considered messengers between the living and dead. Hooppaw was in Iraq, near a pool by the Euphrates River, when a multicolored dragonfly landed near her and stayed for an hour. It was the same day Hooppaw discovered her cat had died from eating contaminated food, and she believes there's a connection between the death and the dragonfly sighting. Because of her fascination with dragonflies, Hooppaw named her business, of recycling trash items into treasure, Silver Wings Creations.

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Date published: 3/18/2009

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