Quote:
Originally Posted by Future75Ranger
Hello Everyone,
My name is John
I sent a medical prescreen to Raleigh, NC MEPS and they sent it back saying that I wasn't eligible to process due to me having 2 collapsed lungs last year. My right lung collapsed in February of last year (2007) and while I was in the hospital getting a chest tube for my right lung, my left lung collapsed...
2 weeks later, I could tell that my left lung was collapsing again, so I went to Duke Hospital in Durham and I got VATS done on my left lung. According to medical professionals, you are only supposed to do VATS if you are recurrent and my surgeon at Duke thought that I had a history of Pneumothorax in my left lung, so he did VATS, so I guess he read my history wrong. All of this happened within a month, but MEPS is still counting it as multiple Pneumothorax and are telling me that they may not reconsider me until 2010 (AR 40-501 says that I must wait 3 years)...
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John:
Welcome to PS.com and thank you for your willingness and desire to enlist. But at this time it isnt in the cards for you.
Having said that your assumptions about the way the Docs at MEPS interpret AR40-501 are wrong. The Docs at MEPS have a job to do and thats to put medically QUALIFIED recruits into the military not those who have a great chance of having future trouble with preexisting medical conditions. AR40-501 is pretty cut and dry when it comes to your condition. You have a history of pneumos.
It isn't going to hurt you to wait two years to enlist. There will still be plenty of people to kill and you will still have plenty of time to serve. My advice to you is to continue to do PT, stop blaming others for you drawing a short stick at this time, get a job, go to college and in two years, or better yet AFTER you graduate college, if you havent had any other troubles with Pneumo's enlist at that time.
In the mean time, do alot of reading here.
Best of luck.
Crip