“He was serving his country in a different way”

Life and healing in progress

March 14, 2011 - She’s a working mother of four who has moved many times during her 22-year marriage. Her husband’s career takes him away from home, often overseas and on short notice. Lee Woodruff is not a military wife, but she could claim a measure of sisterhood.

Her initiation came at a place no one chooses, the bedside of her injured husband at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

Bob Woodruff, then an anchor for ABC News, suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by a roadside bomb in 2006 while traveling with an Army unit in Iraq

“Bob was not a warrior, but he was a firm believer that as long as there were Americans putting their lives on the line for us, there needed to be journalists telling their story,” said Lee. “He was serving his country in a different way.”

The Woodruffs encountered military families with wounded loved ones at Landstuhl and later the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland, where Bob also was treated.

“Bob had gotten so much attention as a news anchor,” she said “Yet this was happening to families around the country every day, and nobody was really aware of it.”

Lee recalled one of Bob’s doctors telling her, “You’re a writer, and you should write a book about this experience. Nobody out there in America knows that there are thousands of young men and women in these hospitals with these kinds of injuries.”

Since then, Lee has written two books. The first, “In An Instant”, co-written with Bob in 2007, chronicles their individual paths through his injury and the early days of his recovery.

Her second book, “Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress”, grew out of the first. Both began during the five weeks her husband lay in a coma. {continued}