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The Vets First podcast is a research-based podcast that focuses on the VA healthcare system and its patients. Instead of being just another research podcast, the Vets First podcast was created with a primary focus on the Veterans and their stories. The hosts, Levi Sowers PhD, and Brandon Rea work to bridge the gap between the state-of-the-art research being performed at Veterans Affairs and the Veterans themselves in an easy-to-understand manner. Importantly, Levi and Brandon want to assist researchers around the country to better understand the needs of Veterans. In this podcast you will hear interviews from Veterans with specific conditions and then hear from VA funded researchers who are studying those very topics as well as other highlighted services the VA provides.
The Department of Veterans Affairs does not endorse or officially sanction any entities that may be discussed in this podcast, nor any media, products or services they may provide.
Announcer: Welcome to the Vets First Podcast, a research-based conversation centered around the VA health care system, its services, and patients. We would like to warn listeners that the following content from this podcast may be triggering for some. If you are experiencing troubling or suicidal thoughts, please call the Veterans Crisis line at 1-800-273-8255 or text to 838-225. From Iowa City, Iowa, here's your hosts: Dr. Levi Sowers and Brandon Rea.
Levi Sowers: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Vets First Podcast. Today it is just me, Levi, Brandon is beginning to take a step back from the podcast a little bit as he goes back to school. And today I'm lucky to have a veteran who is also a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics. His name is Louis Kolling. He was a sergeant in the Army from 2006 to 2012, served overseas in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Welcome to the podcast, Louis.
Louis Kolling: Yep, thanks for having me.
Levi Sowers: So, Louis, first off, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. I think I've been wanting to do an episode like this for a long time where I get to talk to another scientist who was also a veteran and, you guys can't see him, but Louis is an interesting looking dude. He's like a bodybuilder, if you will, or a powerlifter-
Louis Kolling: Powerlifter, yeah. And people sometimes accuse me of being a bodybuilder, which if anybody knows the difference, is quite flattering. It's usually like when I wait for competition and try to get lean just to score better people at gas stations who don't know anything about symmetry or muscle attachment points or anything accuse me of being a bodybuilder.
*laughter*
Louis Kolling: Actual bodybuilders know that I look like crap.
Levi Sowers: But it's amazing. He's a really good scientist too. I've had the joy of listening to him give science talks at our pain interest group at the University of Iowa, and he's a pretty cool dude. So first off, thanks for coming on. And as I always do, I start with, you know, I think you have an interesting story, but where did you come from? How did you end up in the military?
Louis Kolling: Oh man. So, yeah, my family's from West Philly. We moved to eastern Kansas when I was a kid. One high school diploma, between my two parents. So, you know, I grew up in a family. Didn't have a lot. Grew up on a small farm. You know, I didn't really get along with my parents very well growing up. When I was 16, I kind of left home when I was 17. I emancipated myself and joined the military. I applied to a lot of colleges after high school, but I went to super tiny high school and we didn't have AP classes at the time. And my path to school was was kind of messed up a little bit too. So my parents went to a church that was associated or affiliated, I guess, with a radical fundamentalist at the time. And so my mother stayed home to homeschool my brother and I, and we weren't really allowed to take any science classes because the church didn't approve. So into 11th grade, when I went back to public school, the only science class that I ever took was some church approved science class that got in the world around us or something where you just learned that- there 30, I don't know, birds. Bird people don’t get offended, I know a few that would get pretty upset, but I was going to guess - God made 30,000 species of bird because he liked them a lot, you know? And it was like, this is what frogs look like.
Levi Sowers: Yeah, yeah.
Louis Kolling: This is a big cat. This is a house cat, things like that. And that was that was my total background for biology. Sso I didn't have a lot of prospects getting into school, but I did pretty well. The A.C.T., which was pretty surprising to me. I remember I had food poisoning that day and had to test with a bucket under the desk. But I got into- I was admitted to University of Kansas following high school, but I didn't have any money to move there and start school. Like people said, you know, get a scholarship and, you know, getting your tuition paid for is the complete package when really, you know, if you can't move 3 hours away, get set up in an apartment, buy textbooks, feed yourself, have a job lined up - it's pretty difficult. So I, I took the ASVAB as well, the exam.
Levi Sowers: So what’s the ASVAB?
Louis Kolling: The ASVAB is the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.
Levi Sowers: Okay.
Louis Kolling: Yes, the General Aptitude Military Entrance Exam. This was back in 2005. So this was right around the time of the first troop surge for Operation Iraqi Freedom. And recruiters came and actually put the ASVAB on. They hosted it at my school like in the school library-
Levi Sowers: Yeah!
Louis Kolling: And there were like ten, 15, 20 of us or so that took it together, but then we wouldn't have to go to class. This was a recruiting strategy that was used to try to access, you know, people who maybe didn't have the resources or didn't know about, you know, military recruitment and stuff. So we could just take it through the schools. And I had actually taken that to maybe prepare for the ACT. I didn't know about test prep or anything. I didn't know people practiced for exams.
Levi Sowers: At this point had you even thought about the military?
Louis Kolling: I hadn’t. My parents are kind of a kind of a mixed bag as far as their background. Their- my dad is like really conservative now. I don't- I'm not really sure what my mom's political stances, but, you know, in the mid to late seventies, you know, my parents were part of the long hair war protesting movement and which, you know, looking back now that I'm an adult, you know, I say, you know, good for them to stand up for what they believed in and stuff. But at the same time, you know, we weren't like growing up, My brother and I weren't allowed like toy guns and things like that. But we did live on a farm and we hunted.
Levi Sowers: Yeah.
Louis Kolling: You know, I used to shoot trap competitively when I was a kid and stuff, but, you know, I never- the military was never really my rhythm. But so I took the ASVAB to kind of get an idea of what the ACT might be like. And they were nothing alike. But I remember when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do after high school. I had just gotten off work at the grocery store that I worked at in high school, and I was sitting my car turns to go what I was going to do with my evening, and I had a voicemail from- introduced himself as a career counselor, but he basically explained in his voicemail how the army would pay for my college, paid for my tuition only to train, and then like gave me a stipend while I was in college. And I was like, This sounds way too good to be true. I'd never heard of this. I hadn't seen any of the TV commercials. I didn't know about the GI Bill or any of this stuff. And I gave him a call the next morning and when he found out I could pass a drug test, but we went to MEPs like two days later.
Levi Sowers: Wow.
Louis Kolling: And I went and signed up right away. We sped through all the paperwork. I scored really well on the ASVAB. I got to choose what job I wanted, so I was a medic in the Army and then so I enlisted, I think maybe February/March 2006 and I shipped out near maybe the first week of June. So I had maybe a month off after graduation
Levi Sowers: Wow.
Louis Kolling: And then I went to basic training.
Levi Sowers: And you were 18?
Louis Kolling: 17. I turned 18 the week of my basic training graduation.
Levi Sowers: That's really cool. So, wow, that's incredible. And then you served six years, so you served longer than your first
Louis Kolling: well at the time. So every contract is eight years, is kind of the way it worked.
Levi Sowers: Yeah.
Louis Kolling: Yeah. But the way that they describe it is either like three years active service in any branch or component you join, plus five years inactive ready reserve or six plus two or four plus four. So my contract was six plus two
Levi Sowers: Oh, okay.
Louis Kolling: In order to get the signing bonus, you had to go six plus two and at the time they were offering $20,000 as a sign on bonus, which you know, you get half upfront, half the other half have with your contract. So at the beginning of your fourth you get the other half, the signing bonus, which even after taxes you see about $66-6700, which was like way more money than I'd ever seen before. I thought I was rich and I probably didn't use it for anything productive or savings.
Levi Sowers: Welcome to the life of young man. So I think that what's interesting about your story, and I hear all different stories about why people join the military, but you saw it as a chance to go to college. Kind of - is what I'm taking from this. And that's really interesting to hear. I think that's the approach for some people for sure. So can you talk about a little bit about war and what was that like?
Louis Kolling: Yes, So so I joined a reserve component of the Army. And during the troop surge days, reservists got the reserve component and the National Guard component of each respective branch got to see quite a bit of active duty. So in my six years as a reservist, I got right around four years active duty. Part of that was basic training and medic school, which at the time med school was 16 weeks long. The Army likes to experiment with different lengths for medic school to see what's going to be the best trade off, the best content in order to produce the the best medic and the most streamlined amount of time based on troop demands or whatever. So I got out of med school in February of ‘07. I got activated for the deployment like a month later. But that deployment got scrapped, got reassigned to a different unit, so I end up going to get activated for Operation Iraqi Freedom and starting mobilization for that deployment. July 28. I got back from that October of 29 and then in spring of 2010 I volunteered for an Afghanistan deployment. And because my dwell time wasn't long enough, dwell time is like this, like minimum amount of time. They want you to be home between deployments.
Levi Sowers: Yeah.
Louis Kolling: Typically they want you to be home at least as long as you were overseas. just to I don't know. I imagine the goal had something to do with, you know, trying to make sure your mental health was intact and then weren't downward spiraling or whatever. But I had applied for dwell time waiver and that that sets off bells. So I instead got asked if I'd rather go to Germany on this annual training with a different unit across the state. And ironically, about, I would say about seven or eight guys from my platoon in Iraq all end up getting transferred to this mechanic unit to go on this AT together. Got to Germany together, and when we got there, it was supposed to be like a three week AT, and this was a year. There was some large volcanic eruption in Europe and we couldn't fly back. But I remember we got stuck over 30 days. And once you hit over 30 days, consecutive active duty, they now start to turn into active duty time, even if you're a reservist. So kind of a gray area like I sometimes jokingly referred to that as a second deployment because like it did count toward my cumulative duty time, depending on who was doing the counting and for what purpose. But after that, I immobilized. And that was April 2010, mobilized late December, early January 2011 to go to Djibouti, Africa, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. And I stayed there until, I think, February or March 2012. I came home on terminal leave and was on leave until the end of my my contract ran out in April.
Levi Sowers: So. So you're sitting there, young man. Just finished military. Did you want to go back to college? Obviously,
Louis Kolling: So I didn't know that I wanted to get of military even. I mean, I really struggled with it a lot when I was getting close to getting out of the military. Because if you re-enlist while you're overseas, you're signing bonuses tax free.
Levi Sowers: Oh…
Louis Kolling: And I had you know, I had this list of demands that I wanted in order to re-enlist. They were in the middle of the troop surge for Afghanistan. Medics were on shortage, especially in private, because once you hit certain ranks in the military, they send you back to your tech school equivalent. Basically on your branch. They send you back there to do more advanced training. So sure, E-5, E-6, these are all ranks that when you get you go back to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, to learn more medical stuff. And so they wanted to send me to the and they wanted to retain me. But my list of demands I wanted. obviously, I wanted the sign a bonus, right? I wanted a seat to take the flight aptitude test, and that I wanted to go to warrant officers school and fly helicopters. They got me orders for all of these things and they're like, don't you want to stay? But at the same time, my third deployment was wrought with a lot of non-judicial punishment. My entire squad was hit at the time. I was maybe an acting platoon sergeant at the time. We had some shortages in personnel. Like ordinarily, these five would not be sergeant. Sure, that's usually like a team leader position. Team leader is the rank structure under squad, under platoon. I was somewhere floating between, you know, filling in those gaps, but our entire squad received Field Great Article 15s, which is the heaviest punishment you can receive without a court martial. One of the guys in the squad broke camp policy about fraternizing with another member of our unit and the command. Kind of want to make an example out of us.
Levi Sowers: Sure.
Louis Kolling: And it was really difficult. I didn't get demoted, luckily, but, you know, they wanted to make the biggest example out of me because I was the leadership I should have been, you know, I guess, holding my troops to a higher standard. And they put me on extra duty for two weeks in addition to my normal clinic shift. So I was running the troop medical clinic on post and I would do my eight hour shift and then I would go sleep for 2 hours, go to the gym, and then I would go to staff duty for 8 hours. And I did that for 40 days in a row.
Levi Sowers: Sounds brutal.
Louis Kolling: Well, it was terrible. But at the same time, the battalion commander who assigned me this punishment came by the clinic every day, and he came by staff duty in the middle of the night, at least once every day, to make sure that I was awake. Because falling asleep at your post is like the most unforgivable sense of the military because you've now in your post this violates general order number one. This this escalates anything bad that you did to the next tier. Okay?
Levi Sowers: Yeah.
Louis Kolling: But, you know, it actually made me feel better that he was sacrificing his sleep to come check on me that. So it became like the worst thing at that point that really motivated me to to stay awake and just deal with that. But I survived. But dealing with all that, I had kind of soured on the military a little bit.
Levi Sowers: Sure.
Louis Kolling: But even then I was split. You know, I had I tried to go back to school two different times between deployments. The first time was actually after medic school, and the second time was between my it was after my Iraq deployment- immediately after it. And the first time I went back to school, I filled out. I kind of had the curse of, you know, being told I was smart growing up and sure, being the being the best, the brightest student in a small town with-
Levi Sowers: A kid that doesn't have to study for his test.
Louis Kolling: Right. Right. Which means I never learned how to study. So when I when I get to the real world and I'm not in a school with the graduating class of 15 and I go to an actual state accredited university, I got left behind really fast and-
Levi Sowers: I had the same problem.
Louis Kolling: and it made me not really like going to school and I missed the withdrawal date. So I got incompletes on my transcript, tanked my GPA, department at Treasury put a hold on my bank account. They wanted the GI Bill tuition money back. It was a whole thing. So that kind of soured me on school, but I still wanted to try to go back. After my Iraq deployment. I went back for the semester. I got straight Cs in like just, just total like-
Levi Sowers: You got there.
Louis Kolling: I don't yeah, I don't want to offend anybody. But, you know, as a professional scientist, I'm going to say, just like total [censored] classes in speech, college English, things that scientists wish they valued more and were better at.
*laughing*
Louis Kolling: Actually, now that I say it aloud. Maybe I just ate some crow on that one. But yeah, so I was not very good at school, but I still wanted to do it. I, when I was a medic, especially my, my Africa deployment where I was running a clinic, I had a great P.A. who oversaw us and we used her licensure for all of the medications that we prescribed. And, you know, as long as you were prescribing the right things at the right doses to the right patient, she was comfortable letting you work alone to do that kind of thing.
Levi Sowers: Yeah.
Louis Kolling: And that really motivated me to want to learn more about how these drugs work, how they work together. And, you know, I started to spend my free time between patients and in the quiet hours of the clinic cycle, just doing a lot of research on the Internet, learning all about pharmacokinetics and drug receptors and drug classes and all these other things, and really made me interested in physiology and all these other things. And I kind of really wanted to go back and pursue that. But I was worried I was just going to leave the military and fail out and then I wouldn't have a job and I would just owe more money to somebody.
Levi Sowers: Of- of course. Yeah!
Louis Kolling: And I remember when when I was getting about a month out from the end of that deployment, because they knew that if they didn't get me to re-enlist on that deployment, I wasn't going to do it. I was going to go home. The bonus wouldn't be tax free. I would get a taste of not being, you know, the day to day military structure overseas. And I was going to leave, I was going to get out and do anything else and a different company commander, company first sergeant, Battery First Sergeant Artillery Regiment would come by the the clinic every day for every two or three days for like the last months that I was on the deployment. And some of these are people I'd never talked to ever. But like when they walked in the door and just sat down without a sickcall slip, like it was obvious it was just their turn to come in here, try to convince me to re-enlist or what they did. And only one person didn't try to convince me to re-enlist at the time. He was our battery executive officer. He was a first lieutenant and had been prior service enlisted. His name has been running. He came in, he sat down and he said, “You know, I've been here for a long time. And it seems to me that the Army is a great place for people who don't want to grow up. But if you've got anything else you want to do with your life, you know the military and go try it. And if it doesn't work out, the army will take you back. It's not a big deal.” And I was like, You know what? You're right. I'm going to you know, if I go into space out of school, I can just re-enlist. They'll take me like I'm a I'm a high demand job. If I come back within, I think I don't remember exactly what the timeframe was. But if you separate from military and you come back within one year or two years or something, you don't have to go back to basic training. They just throw you a uniform and you don't lose rank. They just, you know, it's like you never left. Basically. So I took a shot on myself. I went back to to undergrad and I had a few weird odd jobs along the way. I was a Bounty Hunter for a while. I used to install ignition interlock devices. I worked at a deli for a bit, kind of all over, I bounced at the bars on the weekends for a while too. But I ended up, you know, finishing my my first degree and I was.
Levi Sowers: So how old were you?
Louis Kolling: So I was 23 when I got out of the military. I finished my first degree at 26. I earned my first bachelor's degree in right around two years and earned my second bachelor's degree. Well, actually, the GI Bill coverage was all based on how many months you go to school, not based on how much money to spend or how many classes you take. So taking more classes faster lets you do more things with more benefits. But the main class that I remember being terrified of was chemistry. When I failed out of school in 2007, chemistry was the biggest terrifying one for me. I had a chemistry class in high school that was like really, really rudimentary. We learned highly technical science. I would just memorize the list and like, that was it. You know, the experiment we did was we put salt in water and evaporated it. And because I think a lot of it too, was just that the the teacher understood that a lot of us just did not have the foundational background to do much more faster.
Levi Sowers: Sure.
Louis Kolling: And, you know, we were all substandard students and we just wanted to stick to class and we didn't want to learn anything because I remember she taught the second half. The second half, the semester is like out of the school year. She taught a rudimentary physics class and we never got past the constant acceleration problems, which is like, you know, the most basic part of Gen Physics I.
Levi Sowers: Yeah, I remember those days.
Louis Kolling: But the way that she instructed the class was all about like trying to teach us the physics principles that led to the discovery and derivation of these equations. It wasn't just like, here's the equation, but the numbers in. It was like, here's why these things go together. So it was obvious that she was she was a great teacher and really understood the material. But like I said, we just didn't get far in chemistry because just a bunch of stupid kids were no doubt- we didn't want to be there, you know, we didn't want to listen to her, but so anyway, chemistry. So that was the first class I actually stopped going to the first time. When I went back to school in 2010, I was doing chemistry, went back to school full time. When I got to the Army, I enrolled in preparatory Chemistry, which Wichita State University is like the remedial chemistry. Yes, I think they're backward. So you can take one of those at Iowa and I go, okay, I forgive you for that. But yeah, I, I thought that I withdrew from that. Apparently, I didn't fill out the paperwork correctly. And because of the point in the semester that I tried to withdraw, I ended up earning a C and for the exercise science degree that I earned first a C in rudimentary chemistry was enough for graduation, so I thought I was, for sure, done with chemistry. But I did my first bachelor's degree and I started graduate school in exercise physiology master's degree because I thought I wanted to do like biology, psychology or something like that. And like, you know, human performance physiology research, something like that. And I started doing research in that field. And it just really wasn't for me. I didn't I didn't like a lot of the bias in the field. There's just not a lot of just the nature of the field is really subjective, I guess is what I'll say. And the the X people really overstretch data and there's also just not funding. So I think maybe maybe the lack of funding is probably what drives a lot of the other cultural things that I didn't like, to be honest. I mean, you're going to have to like just make huge extrapolations if you don't have the money to run more experiments and recruiting even participants. It's just always it's also really difficult, especially if you’re not allowed to compensate because you don't have any funding. You don't want to do it.
Levi Sowers: No, no, no. It's totally a problem in human research.
Louis Kolling: Exactly. But I dropped out of the and I had to really reflect on like, what did I like about the first degree that made me want to be here in the first place and would, you know, it's chemistry. So it was all biochemistry, enzyme reactions - and I was like, I'm going to have to figure out how to do this. So I got to this. Or actually it was the same semester I was enrolled in grad school. So my first semester I co enrolled in a full time undergraduate load and I took physics two, chem one, bio one, and I made straight A's because over the course of my first bachelor's degree, I had learned was how to study. Yeah. As I looked as I progressed through that degree, I got to eventually. There is a couple of difficult courses as you move through there, especially physiology of exercise. And this was a of course, that was taught by the the department chair and he took a lot of pride in Dr. Mike Rogers. He took a lot of pride in not necessarily making that class difficult, but like holding it to a standard amount of knowledge that you needed in order to pass this class. He was not going to curve just because all the students decided to tank in unison. If you don't meet the standard, you don't get to leave with the degree. But they would let people take it, you know, three, four, seven times or whatever. There's a point where you have to start getting like permission from the dean to take it so many times. But, you know, and when I took the class, there were seven people there who had been three or four time repeats. And, you know, you got to admire the persistence. That's good stuff. But absolutely, that class really taught me how to study. He introduces the classes like this is probably the most failed class in all the university but not because I make it difficult. It's because I won't make it easy. And, you know, I took that personally and I really put the hours in and it taught me what I was capable of in an academic setting. So when I dropped out of grad school and went back, you know, just do a second bachelor's degree, I ended up earning a bachelor's in chemistry minors in biological sciences, in mathematics before. So I yeah, I really, I really value the exercise science degree that I got and I end up using it a lot too. So when I got to Ph.D., the lab that I ended up joining when I got to Florida State was a a lab that studied like the relationship between the olfactory circuitry in the brain and the regulation of whole body metabolism.
Levi Sowers: Yeah. So olfactory is smell.
Louis Kolling: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And so as it turns out, at least in rodent models, I don't know, as far as the circuitry in humans, I don't know how much of that is conserved, but I know that usually most of the brain circuitry in rodents is conserved and that's why we use it for brain models. There is reciprocal circuitry between the olfactory bulb and parts of the hypothalamus that regulate whole body metabolism. And it's really interesting because you have a fact that the olfactory bulb just kind of like to transmits, smell signals to maybe, you know, your centers or memory centers or whatever, when in fact, the highest density of insulin receptors in the brain is in your factory bulb. Factory bulb has got receptors for leptin, and glucose, and GLP-1, and all of these metabolic molecules. So right away I saw a component of exercise science in here in metabolism, and it wasn't what I thought I wanted to do or keep doing. It keeps showing up everywhere. I go. So I came here to University of Iowa, joined Catherine Marcinkiewcz’s Lab, the Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, in response to a job posting for Alzheimer's disease in serotonergic dysfunction. And that's primarily what it's done. But out of the like five or six projects that I work on in the lab, one of them is a project that looks at the link between isolation throughout adolescence and the effect on whole body metabolism, glucose sensitivity and the different brain areas involved in that. And that was a project that had just was in its infancy when I showed up and no one knows what to do with. And I show up and I've this background in exercise science, and I said, okay, well, I guess this is the project I'm going to hop on to kind of get acclimated with all the lab equipment and everything I've got.
Levi Sowers: Have you found it to be helpful that you had a military experience in your research? Is it given you the work ethic or did it did it help you in any way in your research?
Louis Kolling: I don't know where the work ethic, in fact. So the the the first time I was ever asked that actually was when I got to Florida State. I joined the molecular biophysics program. And when you get there, there is kind of this core faculty, but also there are somewhere in the neighborhood of like 40 labs across campus that participate in this Institute of Molecular Biophysics. That's the department affiliated with the program. And the first year that we're there, we do lab rotations. And to figure out who you're going to do lab rotations with, you have to email like ten or 15 labs, ask like, are you doing graduate students? Can I come do a rotation with you? And you have to go interview with these people. You interview with five or six. And that's that's how I met my Ph.D. advisor, Debbie Fadool. And when I sat down to do the interview, she asked me, you know, how do you feel that your military background benefits you as far as being a scientist? And I had never considered it. Yeah. And, you know, I gave her some some, you know, I guess in retrospect, some just [censored] jargony. I was like, I don't know. I guess I'm like, I am resilient. Yeah, I got I didn't use the phrase warrior spirit or any kind of [censored], but yeah, I just I really didn't know what to say. But, you know, I think, like, in retrospect, the military is like having been in the military, especially like the experiences I had, the military really helps prepare me for the rest of my life. And it's going to be because getting out of my hometown, like growing up on a small farm and like getting out of my hometown, that's very much like the world and getting experience with with people from other cultures has made me so much more well-rounded a person, but also just interacting with so many different people from diverse backgrounds with the military culture itself really has taught me a lot about like how to understand other people's viewpoints, how to be a better team member, and also like, I guess having been in the position I was in, the leadership role I was in really has taught me a lot about how to how to like, I guess, raise and motivate people in a way that a lot of junior scientists don't have.
Levi Sowers: Right.
Louis Kolling: Like your typical undergrad or graduate students
Levi Sowers: a sort of a leadership role.
Louis Kolling: Right. I guess that you're talking about your typical graduate student. Does every leadership experience when you get assigned an undergrad who doesn't want your work or does a terrible job, you don't know how to address that and how to develop and do better in a way that's going to be constructive for everyone.
Levi Sowers: Yeah.
Louis Kolling: That was something that I already brought to the table.
Levi Sowers: Yeah, really cool. Really cool, man. I think it's neat that you did that. We're going to shift gears a little bit. Yeah. So you obviously served in the military for a while and you seek care from the VA, and I'd like to know a little bit about that experience and if you know. So we discussed a little bit before our interview, you have some lingering effects of your service, right. And you seek care through the VA. I'd like to hear a little bit about that and what that is like. And, you know, does it give you a different perspective? And maybe that's a later question after you talk about it, what it does give you a different perspective on the research that you do like?
Louis Kolling: That's really interesting. Yeah. So I hadn't considered that, but yeah, absolutely it does. So when I got back to my first deployment from Iraq, when I was in Iraq, I was a 50 caliber machine gunner for a convoy security platoon. And I was also the only male medic in the platoon with three medics in the platoon out of 24 of us. And so it was just a small six or seven gunshot team. Primarily, our job was to take brigade commanders or, you know, public affairs people and things like that to compete with local
Sheikhs or, you know, local leaders or, you know, take other like high ranking people to other bases in Iraq to meet with, you know, leaders of other military units and things like that. They like to use phrases like promote capacity or ensure infrastructure. I don't know if we did that, right?
Levi Sowers: Sure.
Louis Kolling: But, you know, it was a fairly stressful job. Right. This is 2008/2009. And when I got home, you know, I was having I was having the itis pretty bad and the itis is PTSD and having a lot of problems sleeping. And, you know, I, I, like many people do I began self-medicating. I started drinking a lot. And that was really just to like, help myself sleep, like I, I never felt like I had a drinking problem until I woke up one day and I realized that, hey, you know, you're drinking almost a liter of vodka every evening to fall asleep. It started this just like one or two cocktails to kind of like, calm down and get yeah, get in the mindset in mood to want to lay down and relax. You know, really quickly escalated as I built tolerance to it. But, you know, so this was this would have been fall 2009 or at least a dozen times. This was before the big VA health care gut job that President Obama sent into place. So I went to the V.A., my local VA facility, I want to say it. And they made it pretty clear to me that PTSD wasn’t service connected. And, you know, as a reservist, they weren't obligated to give me anything. And, you know, not only were they not willing to set me an appointment or tell me where to go next, they were like, you know, also get out. Somebody needs that chair, like real patients. I'm like, okay.
Levi Sowers: Yeah…
Louis Kolling: So yeah, I didn't have a great experience with the VA outright, but things turned around really rapidly. When the Obama administration came in, there were a lot of these scandals and people were-
Levi Sowers: Yes, of course. It was a dark time…
Louis Kolling: You can do your research but-
Levi Sowers: I remember. Yeah.
Louis Kolling: Yeah and just see like it was bad.
Levi Sowers: It was bad.
Louis Kolling: But man, did it do a complete 180. So about I think it was sometime in the neighborhood of like 2014- after I got out of military you know the V.A. come around and contacted everybody. “Hey, you know our bad. We want to give you health care for like, right. You know, you want to get set up.” And luckily, this also this coincided with the the Affordable Care Act enactment. And at the time, I was prepared to be assessed a tax penalty for not having health insurance. You know, sure, I'm a full time student, but as school, my G.I. Bill, the G.I. Bill is getting knocked down and defunded every couple of years because more people are using it and giving everyone a little less money is easier than just telling some people they're not allowed to use the benefits. So, you know, Congress had a hard time taking more money for that. And, you know, it was politics and politics and, you know, so I was pretty happy just to be getting offered health care, you know, just so I wouldn't have to pay a $600 tax penalty every year.
Levi Sowers: Yeah.
Louis Kolling: So, you know, they did that. And, you know, by that time I had kind of figured myself out a bit. I had a mental health crisis in 2012 after I got out, I tried to kill myself. And a good friend of mine from my platoon in Iraq. He made me go to a vet center and I'd never heard of it before. And I don't know they existed back in 2009 when I first tried to see everybody. But, you know, and I don't know if they're around anymore, for all I know, they may have just been a stopgap to start collecting up people like me who had been turned around by the VA, able to be stop gap, and before everything kind of got put into one platform that really started putting patients first, you know, the way, you know, health care institutions, Right?
Levi Sowers: Yeah! Yeah, yeah.
Louis Kolling: But, you know, so I went to the center and I got to meet with, you know, mental health care professionals for the first time and, you know, got to, you know, got to develop a lot of like different tactics for like managing stress and coping strategies and things like that that were really, really helpful. You know, it was I really felt heard when I was there. And I also didn't feel my biggest concern. And I think this is a concern that maybe a lot of veterans have and maybe why they don't seek health care when they need it, because I've spoken to a lot of people and, you know, I'll meet people at the gym still, you know, people will just approach them. This is my Army tattoo or something like that or, you know, I've got a lot of tattoos. So if you see a white person would love it, or I guess any color, you see someone my age. But a lot of times you think, hey, maybe that person was military. Yeah. And go over and start talking to them or whatever. But I talked to a lot of people who's got a lot of mental health problems that they've never addressed, but they know our problems and they won't go seek any kind of like, you know, mental health care about it or anything.
Levi Sowers: Yeah, it's a major problem.
Louis Kolling: The big concern is really, you know, how can I expect a licensed health care or mental health professional to understand what I'm doing? Right.
Levi Sowers: Of course, yeah.
Louis Kolling: They just expect that this person either this, you know, licensed psychiatrist or this, you know, psychologist, you know, whichever can't possibly have had the same life is that, you know, if they've got money and they went to school and they've got this fancy degree, there's no way they were a poor kid who had to go join the military-
Levi Sowers: You know, it's it's interesting. My wife was a counselor for the VA for a long time.
Louis Kolling: Yeah.
Levi Sowers: And she experienced that a lot. And I don't remember exactly how she dealt with it, but basically she was like, I may not understand where you came from, but I can help you with what you're experiencing now. And I think that was an approach that was really interesting from her perspective, but she got that a lot.
Louis Kolling: So that was the effective approach for me too. So I would never have sought out mental health care if I kind of hadn't been forced to. I mean, you know, given the precipitating events, I was kind of inclined to acquiesce. I was like, either I'm going to go, you know, I'm going to let him make me go to this place or, you know, just, you know…
Levi Sowers: No, but, you know, that's that's that's the that's the sad truth of it, right? Is that.
Louis Kolling: Yeah.
Levi Sowers: You know, it's you that has to end up coming to that decision and that can be really hard, especially if you've never had any experience with it. And I think that, while the VA did do a poor job for a long time, you know, the outreach now for mental health is gone- huge.
Louis Kolling: It’s huge. and I agree. I think it's really good. Yeah. You can't you can't go and get like a flu shot without them asking you. Like, “Hey, by the way, do you ever drink more than you need to? And how is parking?”
*laughteR*
Louis Kolling: You know, like they really I don't know. I wasn't going to say. Yeah. When I went to the vet center, you know, and I met with the mental health professional, I really felt like I was I was fired. He really, you know, took an interest in what I was feeling and made it clear to me that, you know, he was at no point trying to understand what I went through. While he was willing to listen. He was more interested in in hearing what I had to say so that he could help me develop, like, actionable coping strategies for me. And, you know, I never felt I never felt judged. And I also never felt I never felt like he was just like superficially, you know, I don't know. I felt like he was really genuine, you know what I mean? And that experience is something that I propagate to other people. You know, when I just meet people in the grocery store, people on the street, people at the gym, and usually tell me about mental health problems that they've been having in that they haven't signed on to this letter because, you know, they don't How can someone else understand what they're feeling, you know, somebody who's not just some stranger at the gym, the army tattoo from the right era. And I tell them about the experience I had where I met with a mental health professional really, really helped me without having the need to understand what I went through. The strategies to tackle the manager stress are still the same. And, you know, fortunately I've been able to direct a lot of people to get the care that they need as well because I'm able to kind of assuage a lot of those concerns that are preventing them getting, you know, taking care of themselves, you know.
Levi Sowers: That's a really cool story, actually. Thank you for telling me and I appreciate that. You know, we're going to wrap things up pretty soon. There. But how how do you think that life experience, you know, you've been through a lot more than, say, me or other people who don't have your same experiences- how has it contributed to your outlook in your career and in science? Does it contribute?
Louis Kolling: Yeah, I think I don't know. I've I've not-
Levi Sowers: Does that make your research more meaningful to you?
Louis Kolling: It does. It does. I never. It's weird, too, that I found myself in a research group that looks at the effects of alcohol use disorder on, you know, pain and the progression of dementia, all these other things. And it's- I don't know. I think that like my recent experiences with the VA health care system as well have given me a better look into like the clinical side of things. And it really helps me see like the big picture. I think that a lot of basic scientists, that's just anybody who doesn't do human facing clinical research that we work with, preclinical models and all these other things, and I collaborate with neurologists and other medical professionals who actually see patients and we, you know, we do things together- it helps me really feel like I'm making a contribution toward things that might actually help real people.
Levi Sowers: Yeah, Yeah, that's been a huge driver for me too. You know, I grew up in a very rural family that has a lot of military people. I chose to go to college. I was lucky enough to go to college, but, you know, several of my family members went to the military. And when I had a chance to do research for the V.A. and do translational research for the VA, despite working in mice, you know, really feeling like I'm contributing to something that might make a difference someday. And I think that was really important to me as I moved through that. And it's cool that you said it. I like it. Awesome. Okay. We're at the last question that I ask all my people that I interview. What do you do outside of science for fun? Besides powerlifting - it has to be something other that that.
Louis Kolling: Okay. So besides my four national and 11 state powerlifting records.
Levi Sowers: Yeah, great - just throwing that out there!
*laughter*
Louis Kolling: I really love riding motorcycles. I sold my last motorcycle two years ago, actually. I rode for a long time. I went to grad school in Florida, obviously, because that's where Florida State University is. And the weather there year round is basically riding weather, right? But man, this thing about living in a college town is that every August, a bunch of people with different unique driving styles that could try to drive together on the road.
Levi Sowers: Oh yeah.
Louis Kolling: And I got tired of getting rear ended, T-boned, and pushed off the road or the sidewalk. And I was like, Yeah, that's not it for me. I, I there was one day there was a traffic light out and I got, I got T-boned in an intersection. The bike was still Rideable and then I got rear ended 5 minutes later and I went, and I was like standing there. The bike got rear end, like went out between my legs. So I see where the grip on it fell over. And I'm looking at it. I'm like, Man, I don't think I want to do this anymore.
*laughter*
Louis Kolling: So I used to really like that. Yeah, I've got two dogs that I absolutely adore, kind of. I have a 13 or 18 lb. miniature dachshund is all teeth and energy, and I have an 85 lb. American bully and she is the most forcefully sweet dog ever. And the two of them are just great. They like to play and wrestle all the time and they battle each other. It's pretty adorable. And I have an amazing, supportive wife. And I think a lot of the things like really we just share life together. So she works full time as a- man, I'm about this because I don't know anything about the clinical side. So she's a clinical research coordinator and she works in the Pomeranz family pavilion. I think she's- cancer trials. I know that she's a clinical research coordinator for cancer. I don't know how the names for their department work.
Levi Sowers: Yeah, it's fine. Don't worry about it.
Louis Kolling: But she also. So her family's from Tallahassee. So I met her while I was doing my Ph.D. and she got a bachelor's degree in psychology and she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with that. She really liked Neuroscience. This is before FSU had a neuroscience program. She, actually, I've never taken a neuroanatomy class in my life. I actually just learned on-the-fly any neuroanatomy that I know. But she used to teach the neuroanatomy course at Florida State. So she actually knows quite a bit more about brain areas than I do. So I haven't worked in it. So yeah, absolutely. This is just yeah, it's a lot. I don't feel the need to learn things I'm not going to use yet. Like I have enough things on my list that I need to learn for-
Levi Sowers: Yeah, I'm not a traditional- I'm not a traditionally trained neuroscientist. So when I start a new project I have to go in and figure out what its all about.
Louis Kolling: Yeah, exactly.
Levi Sowers: Well, hey, I really appreciate you coming on today and telling your story. I think it's pretty cool what you experienced, what you overcame, and what you're doing. Science. We need more veterans in science. So if you're listening and you're thinking about doing a PhD, should they do a Ph.D. someday?
Louis Kolling: That's a great question. If you want to be an independent researcher, you really must have a Ph.D., right? Think of a Ph.D. not necessarily as some six year black hole after undergrad where you're trying to dodge out repaying your student loans.
Levi Sowers: I think it can be.
*laughter*
Louis Kolling: A lot of people use it for that, they really do. But think of it more like an apprenticeship where skilled scientists teach you how to science in an efficient way. So if, you know, if you're curious about the world around you, maybe a PhD is for you. If you just like making people call you doctor when they get a crappy attitude at the airport, you can get a Ph.D. as well. Like, that's fine. It's for everybody.
*laughter*
Levi Sowers: All right. Thanks, Louis, and thanks for listening, everybody. We're going to have a couple more veterans coming on real soon. This will be the second episode of season four. So thank you for listening.
Announcer: This concludes today's Vets First Podcast. For questions or comments relating to the program, please direct email correspondence to vetsfirstpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!