Beauty Contestant In Skokie Fights Ugly Foe......PTSD

This week an international beauty pageant’s being held in Skokie. This angle might interest you.

On Friday and Saturday Amber Wandtke competes for the title of Mrs. International.

She’ll also be fighting the illness the illness that’s struck both her and her husband: PTSD, and promoting awareness of a promising treatment being pioneered in Chicago.

“My mission,” says the current Mrs. Virginia International “is to pick up the crown and sash for the millions with this disorder. I know personally just how horrible it is.”

The beauty queen first experienced that horror when her husband Nick, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan, was medically discharged with PTSD in 2010. “He came back unable to sleep, with terrible nightmares, and attacks of being unable to breathe,” Amber said. “It strained our marriage.”

As Amber, herself a Naval Petty Officer First Class, helped her husband through his long recovery, she discovered that she had also been fighting the symptoms of PTSD most of her life. “I had a tremendously challenging childhood and a very painful divorce,” she says. “Who knew those battlegrounds had caused my years of fear, anxiety and sleep difficulties?”

As Mrs. Virginia International for the last five months, Amber has met with the state’s active-duty soldiers, veterans, and civilians with PTSD. Now she wants to carry that battle around the world.

This week she’ll compete against 75 other contestants worldwide for the title of Mrs. International at the Northshore Center for the Performing Arts. The 24-year-old tradition honors married women 21-54.

“I want the world to know that PTSD strikes more than just soldiers,” Amber says. “And I want more victims to know about the Stellate Ganglion Block to treat it.”

A Stellate Ganglion Block is a neck injection that provides rapid relief of PTSD symptoms. The treatment, pioneered by Hoffman Estates Pain Specialist Eugene Lipov, MD, was recently featured in Time Magazine.

The physician’s positive results have been published in Military Medicine and successfully replicated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Naval Medical Center San Diego, and other medical centers nationwide. Those studies have shown about 75 percent of PTSD sufferers report relief within 30 minutes following their injections. Studies suggest that injection numbs signals which normally travel to the brainstem and brain and contribute to the symptoms of PTSD.

“When I first heard about the Stellate Ganglion Block,” says Amber, “it just blew my mind – it was so unique and so new! I wondered why I hadn’t heard of it before.”

Last month Amber became the National Spokesperson for Chicago Medical Innovations, a local organization dedicated to studying this new treatment. “Now,” she says, “I have a once-in-a- lifetime opportunity to spread the word.”

“We couldn’t have a better partner in fighting this condition,” says Dr. Lipov. “Amber’s not just a beauty queen with a major platform, she knows first-hand how devastating PTSD is.”

Husbands play a critical role in the Mrs. International Pageant. During the evening-wear competition, Nick will accompany Amber onstage. And if Amber realizes her dream of winning Mrs. International, Nick will place her crown on her head.

“That seems so right to me,” says Amber, “because PTSD isn’t just my cause, it’s our cause.”

 Advanced Pain Centers is located at 2260 W Higgins Rd  Hoffman Estates, IL 60169,(847) 608-6620. The web address is www.advancedpaincenters.org.