Rock bottom didn’t come for Army veteran Carla Best when she was sitting hunched and angry on the couch for so long that her muscles got stuck in a curve. It didn’t come on any particular day of her 15-year-long depression, or any single moment when she realized the VA-prescribed opioids she was knocking back like breath mints were running her life.
The day two years ago when Best, who lives in Aurora, snapped and let her rage pour out over her daughter’s girlfriend — the hours afterward when she feared her daughter would never speak to her again, and the ones where Best decided she was going to end her life — that was a low point in an adulthood well-grooved with lows.
But Best couldn’t help it. It was almost October. The month when, in 2004, the convoy she was riding in through Baghdad exploded into parts of people and vehicles, leaving her with fractured hips, a traumatic brain injury and legs so damaged she’d eventually have one amputated above the knee.
There had been help available over the nearly 20 years that followed the attack. Help for the physical wounds and the invisible ones that caused her to withdraw, to isolate herself, and finally to lash out. But Best never wanted to be weak. This time, she decided, she would ask for it.
The help that allowed 49-year-old Best to pull herself back from the brink was not therapy, though she credits that too with helping her heal over time. Nor was it psychedelics, or supplements, or SSRIs.
It was sled hockey: A three-day clinic in Denver offered through the Wounded Warrior Project that Best dragged herself to having never watched or played a game of hockey in her life.
The experience flipped a switch for her. “It wasn’t so much about being on the ice and playing,” said Best. “It was about the people.” She felt an instant connection — a camaraderie she hadn’t felt since her time in the Army.
It was the spark she needed to reignite her humor, her desire to heal and eventually her goal of giving back.
A zombie in the basement
When the Toyota she was riding in hit the improvised explosive device in Iraq, Best remembers feeling like all the air was sucked out of the vehicle, then a blast of intense heat. She couldn’t hear anything, could only see the sparks of the dragging metal grinding over the ground.
Her friend and fellow sergeant Ramone Guitard appeared to be dead. Someone was screaming, she noticed. It took awhile before Best realized it was her.
The wounded were flown about 40 miles north of Baghdad, and that’s where Best woke up inexplicably — impossibly — hearing her brother’s voice calling her name.
Anthony Ebeling was a soldier deployed to Iraq, too. And here he was, by his sister’s side while Best slipped into and screamed out of a morphine-induced coma for the hours it took them to stabilize her for the flight to Germany.
The experience traumatized him more than Best realized, and led to self-destructive habits that lasted well beyond her two-year stay at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
“He was self-medicating with alcohol. I was self-medicating with the opioids that the VA was giving me, and we didn’t realize what was going on,” she said.
Best said she was already in full-blown depression when her brother passed away from a heart attack in 2014. Right afterward, Guitard, who had survived for 10 years as a double amputee, succumbed to cancer.
Best felt like she had lost two brothers back to back. “And I just quit,” she said. “I quit everything.” She spent days alone in her basement. If she ventured upstairs, it was to sit on the couch like a zombie in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“I was broken. Mentally broken,” Best said. “I had no aspirations to do anything.”
“I starting laughing, and it felt so good”
Getting a shutdown, out-of-shape, drug-addicted amputee like Best into a highly physical team sport like sled hockey might not have seemed obvious.
But for many wounded veterans like Best, adaptive sports are an empowering way to regain a sense of self and reconnect socially.
“We know wholeheartedly that physical activity is so important to overall well-being, not just physically, but it has such a deep impact on mental health as well,” said Meghan Wagner, Wounded Warrior Project’s director of physical health and wellness.
Wagner said team sports or those practiced in community can provide social protection for veterans after the camaraderie they experienced in the military was stripped from them.
On the ice during that first sled hockey clinic, Best found herself being goofy again. She had grown up the class clown; humor allowed her to make friends as she moved around as a military brat. But she hadn’t been that girl in years.
“I didn’t even think I could be that person because once you’re this depressed person you don’t laugh again,” she said. “I started laughing, and it felt so good. And I just wanted to keep going.”
The ultimate hypewoman
Best threw herself into sled hockey — and recovery. She worked with her VA doctor to wean herself off the opioids. And she played as much as her broken body would allow.
“Getting hit a couple times, falling over makes you feel alive, it really does,” Best said. “Hitting something, that makes you feel alive.”
She got involved with the Colorado Sled Hockey youth team, lifting up and cheering on the kids on their own journeys. It is one of the few leagues that welcomes children and adults with developmental disorders and mental health conditions as well as physical disabilities.
“I just want them to have as much fun as they can, realize their potential, and know that there’s nothing that they can’t do,” Best said. “I don’t want them ever sitting in a basement one day, depressed.”
Best took on the organization’s social media accounts and outreach, and helped double the number of kids on the youth team, according to Jerry DeVaul, who previously ran the organization and remains involved as a player.
He called Best “a fun, energetic individual full of life, full of laughter.”
“Carla is always on the sideline, cheering, pounding on the glass, making noise for the team,” DeVaul said. “She’s the ultimate hypewoman.”
Best is also using her energy and determination to drum up support for legislation that would improve mental health care offerings for female veterans. She recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to advocate for the BRAVE Act currently before the Senate.
She’s the Wounded Warrior Project’s warrior advocate leader for Colorado, organizing roundtable discussions, meeting with local leaders and educating other wounded veterans about the issues affecting them and how to use their own voices to make change.
“If you don’t have people like Carla out there, then we go unseen,” DeVaul said. “It’s great people like Carla that keep advocating and making sure that we’re not falling through the cracks.”
A new sense of purpose
One piece of the BRAVE Act entails improving how the VA identifies women veterans who need help and tailoring it more for them. It’s legislation Best thinks could have made a difference for her when she was stuck and stupefied on that couch.
“It would have helped a tremendous amount just to have more (of) them knowing … what these women are going through,” she said. “It’s a different level of mental health care that they need.”
Women veterans report being discouraged from seeking care while in the military, and feeling unheard when they spoke out about any needs that were not being met. Following service, more than three-quarters of wounded female veterans struggle with conditions including PTSD, sleep problems, depression and anxiety. They also experience loneliness at a higher rate than their male counterparts.
Best had lost her sense of purpose when she was medically retired from the Army. It was rekindled when she discovered sled hockey and amplified when she realized the impact she could have on kids and other veterans just by being present, supportive — and a little loud.
Being an advocate for others now makes Best feel like even if she can’t continue carving up the ice forever, she’ll still have a purpose.
Now, she’s up to try anything. She goes skiing a lot, and says she and her pickleball partner are “deadly.”
She’s getting better about being kind to herself. She’s getting stronger mentally, better able to manage the mental ups and downs she knows will always be a part of her story. She’s realized that she doesn’t have to be a gold-medal athlete to motivate and inspire others.
She tells the youth players — the ones who are headed to the Paralympics and the ones who are just there to have fun — that it’s OK to get frustrated, and it’s OK to fall. It’s OK to ask for help.
“I think that when I’m talking to them,” she said, “I’m talking to myself, too.”