“My daughter wasn’t in that war,” he said. “But there’s no doubt in my mind that she’s paying the price because I was in it.”
Jessica Dekoff seemed healthy until she started kindergarten and a teacher said Jessica was dozing off in school. That’s when the seizures began.
“We took her to a children’s hospital. The diagnosis was epilepsy, and they treated her for that, but the seizures kept going,” Arthur said. “Then she had a stroke, and she lost the use of her right side, and it also left her mentally handicapped.
“The doctors kept questioning me about if I had ever been out of the country, and I told them I was in Vietnam. That was the end of the questioning. They didn’t need to talk about it any longer,” Arthur said.The CT scan confirmed that it was Moyamoya disease, a rare condition first identified by the Japanese. “They told me my daughter had a year to live,” Arthur said.
Jessica lived, but at 34, she has the mental capacity of a 9-year-old.
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