Bill and Christine Marcum stayed at the Brooke Army Medical Center Army Fisher House in Joint Base San Antonio, Texas when their son, Kyle, was hurt in combat. Now, they proudly support the Fisher House mission for other families.
Bill and Christine Marcum are proud supporters of Fisher House, sometimes donating and always spreading awareness of the Foundation, the houses, and their mission. But like many others, they learned about Fisher House in one of the worst moments of their life: when their son, Kyle, was badly injured in combat.
Kyle was brought to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio after being injured in Afghanistan. Christine met with a case manager at the hospital who introduced her to the Fisher House.
At the hospital in San Antonio, doctors worked on Kyle’s injuries, especially wounds to his right leg and foot.
“It was pretty obvious it was going to be a long-term thing,” Christine said. The family lived in Springfield, Missouri at the time, so travel and accommodations would have been an immediate problem if it weren’t for the nearby Fisher Houses.
“All I could think of was his big open wound on his foot and all the external devices on him. So I went over to the Fisher House and appealed to them, ‘Please, I have to have a room here.’ I was in tears,” she said.
Bill relied on his wife to take care of Kyle and keep him informed when he couldn’t be there.
“For Christine, having a base in San Antonio, where the closest off-post lodging is probably a good 25-minute drive by the time you go through security and so on, being there on the campus across the street from the hospital was everything,” he said.
The family also relied on Fisher House’s Hero Miles program to help other family members, like Kyle’s sister Alison and her 1-year-old daughter Lily, come and visit him.
Kyle worked hard to recover, even as his leg eventually required amputation, and then follow-on infections forced him to shorten the limb again. He met his future wife, Megan, in his rehabilitation program.
“He trained hard and eventually, to our amazement, was declared fit for duty with no restrictions and deployed two more times,” Bill said.
Now, the family continues to support Fisher House Foundation and Lilly, who became obsessed with her uncle’s prosthetics, is now studying at Carnegie Mellon University how to improve prosthetics for veterans and other disabled people.
