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BCMS ALLIANCE

Military

City

By Jenny Case, MSN, MBA, RN

Military medicine has had a profound impact in shaping the person I grew to be. My dad, uncle and grand-
father were all Army physicians and my mother was an Army medivac pilot. When I was young, the military
allowed my family to live and explore Washington D.C., Germany and Hawaii all before calling San Antonio
home.
Everyone remembers where they were on September 11, 2001. I was in 7th grade on Fort Sam Houston.
Over the next few months my father, an Army orthopedic surgeon, along with multiple friends’ parents were
deployed overseas. Brook Army Medical Center (BAMC) was one of the Army’s major medical centers and
began treating a growing number of Wounded Warriors that were being evacuated from overseas. Amputees
and burn patients soon became more common in the San Antonio community as they were being treated for
their injuries at Fort Sam Houston. With an increase in need for rehabilitation for these injured soldiers, my
father was put in charge of opening the Center for the Intrepid, a state-of-the-art rehabilitation center for
Wounded Warriors. A few years later when it came time for me to decide what I wanted to do with my life, I
was drawn to what I grew up around, military medicine.
I decided to continue on with our family’s tradition of service and joined ROTC at TCU with the goal of
becoming an Army Nurse. My now husband finished his medical school in El Paso on an Army scholarship as
I started on my first job as a medical-surgical nurse at Fort Bliss. While the military was training us to be
experts in our respective medical fields, we were also expected to be soldiers and officers. The leadership that
the military expects from all of their soldiers, to include nurses and physicians, is what sets up these professionals
to flourish when they become civilians.
With my husband starting his pediatric residency back at BAMC, I was able to transfer to San Antonio and
began to work on the Wounded Warrior floor where my dad had spent a majority of his time. After five years
in service, I left the Army and started graduate school and raising our daughters. When my husband was de-
ployed for nine months with a Cavalry unit, it was inspiring to watch him pivot from his training as a pedia-
trician to taking on the role of Battalion Surgeon for almost a year − pushing his medical expertise and
continuously learning while taking care of soldiers.
I spent the first 32 years of my life in the military health care system, so entering civilian life for the first
time was nerve-racking to say the least. Fortunately, San Antonio is known as Military City with good reason.
As the backbone to the military medical effort over the last 20 years, the city has always embraced and thrived
alongside its military community. This is the reason you would be hard-pressed to find a hospital in San An-
tonio without former military members on their staff. While I was sad to leave the military community, I am
ecstatic to continue to work in Military City and enhance our medical community for the better.

Jenny Case, MSN, MBA, RN is the President-elect of the BCMS Alliance.

10 SAN ANTONIO MEDICINE • February 2022