Further proof that family court still is heavily stacked against men.

My younger brother (now 36) married when he was in his early 20s, joined the army soon after September 11, and had a baby girl. He did two tours in Iraq and was in fact one of the first to go.

After a second tour in Iraq, he took several crappy jobs to support his family. We’re from Michigan, so the economy has never been good, but he got out right about the time the financial crisis hit. So it goes.

Since most of the automobile jobs had been shipped overseas or de-unionized, he was hired by a temp agency to work at a former GM steering gear plant. The plant is owned by a Chinese company. He worked in communications in the military and he leveraged his skills to work on magnetic compatibility testing for the electronic steering gears that allow cars to basically park themselves. His tests involved blasting the steering wheels with various frequencies to make sure your car doesn’t take a hard right when you answer your cell phone while traveling at highway speeds.

Since it’s a temp agency, he only makes $14/hr and the temp agency takes a cut. Health insurance is so expensive that he can’t afford it while supporting his family. The cost at the time was several hundred dollars per pay period.

Fast forward to 2014 and he starts having these weird spasms and wakes up on the middle of the night like he’s been shocked with electricity. He goes to the doctor thinking maybe he had sleep apnea, but they end up doing some scans of his head and he comes out diagnosed with a brain tumor about the size of a pear that the doctors say had been growing for about 10 years. The spasms turned out to be seizures.

Since he needs to go to a ton of doctors appointments and eventually had a surgery for a biopsy, the temp agency fires him for having to miss work.

The doctors say there is nothing surgical they can do for the tumor since his brain has rewired itself and removing it would severely reduce his quality of life, causing him to perhaps not be able to speak and lose the ability to move one side of his body. So they opt for radiation and chemo. All told, he has about $300,000 in medical bills.

His seizures cause him to lose his driver’s license. His seizures also keep him from doing many jobs. He files for social security disability and receives it, but also applies for military disability. He’s award a percentage (like 40% I believe), but then continues to try to prove a military connection to the tumor. After years of fighting for it, he eventually gets 100% and all of the back pay that comes with it.

His wife, who worked as a bartender, leaves him within a couple months of being awarded a lot of back pay and files for divorce. She takes 12 grand out of their accounts and gets her own place and hires a divorce attorney.

After months of lawyers and court dates, they are going to share custody. She is being awarded half of his military back pay. He has to pay her several hundred dollars per month in child support even though she now works for her new boyfriend’s dad’s pharmaceutical sales company, who could theoretically make it look like she makes very little money to have gained an edge in the child support equation.

How fucked up is our system when a veteran, deployed twice, who can’t work, had an inoperable brain tumor and has perhaps less than ten years to live, has to pay his ex wife his military disability pay to the tune of high 5 figures in cash, and also pay her child support?

tl:dr

Brother is a veteran and was diagnosed with a brain tumor, given 10 years to live. Gets a large sum from military disability back payment. Wife divorces him soon after and the court gives her half despite him not being able to work. Court orders him to pay child support despite the fact that he is unable to work due to seizures.