 I was in denial a lot that I was even injured and I was in denial that I even rated a purple heart for a while, which was difficult for me, you know, because, I mean, I had a lot of friends that have been more severely wounded physically than I had. During my fifth deployment, like I said, I was in Afghanistan. There was four vehicles. I was the convoy commander and then there was probably a squad reinforced that was doing a dismounted sweep, kind of on the outskirts of Marjah in Afghanistan, so down in Helmand, Providence. They saw us coming. They went and did a hasty dig and then in place the IED. When we got hit, it basically sounded like a water bottle filled full of air. It went off. I remember being hit. The whole front nose of the vehicle lifted up and I saw a blue sky. I remember my head hitting like the ceiling, but I was still conscious at that point. I remember there was a lot of smoke and dust inside like the cam. I immediately realized that my iPro was off my face and one of my gloves was off my hand. I didn't have any pain, like my adrenaline was going through like the roof. The radio handset was not in my hand anymore, so my thing was, okay, where's that at? And I want to make sure that they're still powered to the radio so I can talk. From there, I used the vehicle in front of me to give a 10-digit grid of where our location was. Then I was told, hey, you need to go call in a medevac for all three of you. So I proceeded to go call in the medevac and then we waited because then the guys on the ground needed to sweep and make sure there was no secondaries. From there, they pulled us outside of the vehicle and we went to a casualty collection point. So they screamed me and they said, hey, you have a grade three concussion and this thing called the TBI and I'm like, okay, two weeks of light duty and you're good. So I passed all the psychological testing. They did a C scan on my brain. They said I was fine. So I said, great, I want to go back and mentor my guys. So my second week of light duty, I managed to get back and then my battalion CO approached me and said, hey, I want you to stay inside the base. We want you to be in charge of firing one of the two guns that's going to be permanently on standby to shoot. And I said, great. The next two months, roughly, I stay inside the base, fired a cannon 30 to 40 times, the two highest powder charges and as time went on, I started noticing slight symptoms like, hey, we even fired the cannon a week. Why are my ears ringing? And I started noticing these weird headaches that were appearing. I said, well, it's because it's hot and I'm PT and I'm dehydrated. Then I started noticing this weird pressure on the left side of my face. Me being me, which is stubborn, well, I probably should have went and had it looked at. My acting exo came over and said, hey, I hear you jacked up. I want you to go to medical. In my jacked up thought process of everything I'm thinking, I'm like, hey, I wonder if these two things are connected, firing the cannon and getting blown up. It turns out it was because it takes, they say, unless the data has changed nine months for your brain to pretty much establish a new baseline and heal from an original blast exposure to traumatic brain injury, well, it was about a month for me or less. So basically being exposed to all that cannon fire was basically many more grade one concussions over and over again. So it was rangering my brain and all of the trauma. So from there, I was medevacked and I ended up in Germany for two weeks. And then there I got back stateside September 4th of 2010. Looking back and the steps I've had to take to establish my new baseline in life, I do accept my injuries now. The biggest thing that got me through this was whether it was the PTSD aspect or like the TBI. If I continue to let this injury control my life, then the Taliban, the insurgents, whoever it is, al-Qaeda, then they're still winning. And I didn't want that. As a whole, it isn't too challenging anymore for all these years. So it's seven years later, I'm still trucking along. So yeah.