This isn’t a research corporation. It’s families who couldn’t find anywhere else to turn.

“I started Behind The 22 to get better care for my husband, who has extensive head and spine injuries, along with toxic exposure. These failures almost took him from me — more than once. His time now is for resting and recovering. Mine is for fighting to get him, and people like him, care that’s better, more accessible, and safer. I don’t ever want another family to go through what we’ve been through — especially when so much of it could have been prevented with the right care in the first place.”

Taylor McGowanFounder, Behind The 22

My husband, Michael, is a former USMC Sergeant who deployed with HMLA-169 attached to the 15th MEU (Special Operations Capable) in 2001, part of the element that stood up Camp Rhino, the first American base in Afghanistan, and returned for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Afterward, he spent his career on the other side of the rescue — as a firefighter, an EMT, K9 search-and-rescue, and a caseworker for homeless veterans.

He has an extensive head and spinal injury history, heavy toxic exposure, severe PTSD, autonomic dysfunction, a heart pacemaker in his mid-40s, and more. The lack of knowledge at the care level for his health issues — which could also be considered a progressive version of “operator syndrome” — led to multiple suicide attempts. Once we were finally able to find an operationally functional VA, they were able to save his life.

Now it’s time to fix the issues that led to his harm, and others who we’ve already lost.

A little about me

I’m Taylor McGowan. My background is in forensic and management accounting — trained to follow a paper trail until it actually explains what happened, not just what got reported. I’ve spent years working in enterprise systems and software engineering, the same skill set behind Behind The 22’s own research tools and this website.

I’m Michael’s federally appointed VA fiduciary and his full-time caregiver. I’m preparing to go back to school — a Bachelor’s degree in Human Systems Engineering, with a minor in medical physics, at Arizona State University — once the tools I’ve built for Behind The 22 help me get a handle on everything Michael needs. Those are the two disciplines Behind The 22’s research is built on: one for understanding the physical mechanisms behind an injury, the other for understanding how the systems around a person produce, or fail to produce, the outcome they end up with. Longer term, I plan to pursue VA claims agent accreditation and a JD focused on veterans law, disability rights, and federal tort claims — closing the gap between finding a systemic problem and actually being able to do something about it.

Before any of this had a name, I did corrective strength coaching with disabled veterans — one person at a time, hands-on, long before there was a research organization or a caseload behind it. It’s still the same work. It’s just at a different scale now.

Why I built these tools

I built this for my husband and me first.

I manage so much of Michael’s life: benefits applications, claims, oversight complaints, finances, care appointments, and care advocacy. Before, getting ready for a single appointment could take me days of pulling together his history so the doctors wouldn’t miss anything — and I couldn’t do anything else while I did it.

What I noticed was that all of it — the appointments, the benefits applications, the claims, the complaints — was pulling from the same information in the same documents. I’d spent years going into organizations to audit their accounting, financials, and systems, so organizing information into something that works came second nature. I built a system around his records, and the Universal Case Manager grew out of it.

Now I can choose the specialty of the provider and produce a medical history summary with his most up-to-date information, in minutes instead of days. He doesn’t have to relive each traumatic moment before every appointment. And he feels more informed about what is happening in his own care.

Michael has survived multiple suicide attempts, and I was the one who responded. Looking back, a tool like this might have helped us catch a medication-related problem before it ever reached crisis — one that may have been contributing. Instead it took an inpatient team to piece it together, and he lives with permanent injuries today. At home, we manage things like cognitive load every day. The BT22 Profile is built to recommend supports like that, once it has analyzed your records and exposures.

Most things out there are built for people with mild issues. Complex, moderate, and severe cases fall through the gaps — and that’s who we built this for. Every family doing this work deserves tools that help. See how it works.