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Warrior Care
Linda Rasnake has succinct advice for people who are new to the caregiving role. Get a day planner. Take notes. Google what you don't know. Ask a lot questions - and don't be intimidated.
Rasnake is a military caregiver who has touched the lives of thousands of wounded warriors and their families in recent years. She has become a sort of matriarch for the tightly knit caregiver community. And the reason that she has been such an effective advocate for military families in crisis is that she has been there herself.
Rasnake's husband, a medically retired Army sergeant 1st class, suffered a bad fall during a training accident. In 2006, his injuries began to grow worse and he eventually underwent more than a dozen surgeries.
Rasnake spent months in and out of military hospitals while supporting her husband and she often felt that nobody really understood the challenges she was facing.
"The one thing that used to drive me crazy is when a [hospital] employee would say, "I know what you're going through." Well - I guarantee you don't," she said.
"With me, [the caregivers] know that I know what they're going through. I've been through the struggles. Living in a hotel, making a makeshift kitchen out of a closet - the whole nine yards - and, still paying your mortgage or rent back home."
"We just figure out a way to make it work," she said
In the past decade, Rasnake has become a prominent leader and advocate for wounded warriors and their caregivers. She grew into the role naturally as she began spending more time in Washington, D.C. - living out of a hotel for more than a year - while her husband was getting care at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC) in Bethesda, Maryland.
"I just couldn't sit around and do nothing and wait for appointments," Rasnake recalled about her eventual move from Arizona to Washington, D.C. "So, I kind of started pulling the fabulous nonprofits together and doing big, big events, and really doing anything that I could."
Relentlessly positive and a self-described workaholic, Rasnake was a volunteer at first, but then she was the first person hired for the Warrior Transition Brigade at Walter Reed Bethesda in 2007. Since then, she has tapped her creativity to organize annual family-focused events. She helps with fundraising efforts. Most mornings she posts on social media to lift the spirits of military caregivers and spread the word about small-group events.
She's the person caregivers call because they know she'll listen. Rasnake feels it's her job to help in any way possible, even if the caller hasn't been at Walter Reed Bethesda for 10 years or more.