Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I got several letters from the SS Disability office last weekend, about setting up a hearing on my appeal. This is the stage at which we get to submit more evidence for my claim.

I called my neurologist's office yesterday, in part to ask whether he can help with this, after a single visit. He called this morning and said (reasonably) that the cognitive and neurological stuff is hard to prove, and recommended a neuropsych evaluation. He offered to have his staff make an appointment for that, which I asked him to do.

They called this afternoon to offer me an appointment -- for January 7, that being the first available. I suspect that will be too late to be useful for this hearing, but I made the appointment, and confirmed that I wanted to be on the waiting list for any cancellations.

Also today my eye doctor's office called, to reschedule my annual exam from July to October. I asked to be on a waitlist there as well.

I need to call the lawyer for the disability appeal, but am not sure I can deal with it today. If not, I will call tomorrow afternoon, expecting to leave a message and ask him to call me back. I didn't call him yesterday because I wanted to talk to the neurologist first.

[Noting here to ask lawyer whether we should get in touch with Dr. AbdelRazek.]

It has been more than a month since I got email saying that my application for disability benefits had been rejected, and an explanation would be coming in the mail*. I have not received an explanation, or any other mail from them. I have now left two phone messages with the person at their office who was assigned to my case, asking how I can appeal the rejection without having received that paperwork.

So far, my contact hasn't answered. There's a 60-day window for appealing the decision. I'm not sure of the right thing to do here. Things that have occurred to me: (a) look for a lawyer to help; (b) file an appeal online to avoid missing the deadline, even though the first page of that process implies that I should have answers to what they have; (c) ask my congresswoman's office for help.

Does anyone know a Massachusetts lawyer or organization that helps with this, or have other suggestions?

*What I actually got was an email saying "we have made a decision, log in to see it" and that got me the bare-bones answer.

I finished the "activities of daily living" questionnaire yesterday afternoon, and cattitude stayed up late last night to finish his questionnaire about me. adrian_turtle girded her loins, went out into the cold, and mailed them at the post office this morning.

I am still, or again, feeling stressed, but at least there's nothing I need to do about this for a while, so it doesn't matter if I'm a bit distracted for a day or three.

I did call the person at their office after lunch, and left a message telling her that we had mailed back all the forms either yesterday or this morning, because it might help and can't hurt.

I have completed the "work history" forms, and will mail that tomorrow. I'm partway through a first draft of the more complicated and emotionally strenuous one that asks what I can do, what I can't do anymore, and so on. They overlap, because this one asks about how my condition affects my ability to work.

First draft because while there are a few straightforward questions (who do you live with? do you drive?) there are a lot more like "do you prepare meals? how frequently? how long does it take" and "what do you do all day?"

Today's mail had a letter telling me that they'd sent the previous large envelopes, and asking me to call and let them know whether I want to add any medical providers (yes) and when am I going to return the forms? I left a message, asking the "disability examiner" to call me back. I hope to be able to tell her something like "I'm going to send this one back today, and hope to send the other tomorrow. My new psychiatrist is $name, at the same number as you had for my previous psychiatrist, and she has access to the previous doctor's charts."

Also, I had to cross out and re-write some things on the "work history" form because I'd put the numbers on the wrong lines. This despite doing a first draft on my computer, because that's not something I first-drafted. On the other hand, one of the things I'm telling them is that I make more mistakes than I used to...

I just learned that "The Disability Determination Service (DDS) started a medical review of your application on July 16, 2022. We expect this review to take 7 months."

That counts as progress, albeit slow.

I'm applying for Social Security disability (SSDI)

I got a letter from the social security administration today, telling me that I needed to complete my disability application b April 27th. I hadn't realized that starting an online application also started some sort of clock. I'd paused, and saved my work, several times, including once to see whether it would behave better on Chrome than on Firefox.

The letter says "please go online and complete" two specific forms, which are the application and consent for my doctors to send them info. So I did that, adding a couple of sentences and the date of an upcoming medical appointment. Then I saved and/or printed almost every page of the application, just in case.

The next paragraph of their letter says "you must send us the original records," but I'm not entirely sure of what they're asking for. I think it means we need to do our 2021 income tax, so I can send them a copy. The letter gives a specific person (name and phone number/extension), so I called and left a message asking what if anything I need to send by that deadline.

I think that's all the application forms I need to complete and send in for the time being -- the other recent ones were the German naturalization application, apartment rental applications, and (minor) the application to have the company that makes the T cell test waive my fees.

For Blogging against Disabilism Day, David Gillon has written about not 'Giving Up' and about non-disabled people's harmful prejudices about him using a wheelchair.

As part of setting up my system again, I went to get AdBlockPlus Flashblock for Firefox. There was a "donate $5" link, and I looked at it, and thought that yes, I like that add-on a lot, I'll throw the programmer $5. So, connected to Paypal, specifically their Malaysian instantiation, which told me it was US$5, and that the money was going to Philip Chee. I'd hit the "submit" button before I stopped to think "that name sounds familiar," and I spent a moment wondering if it was the same one. The next day's email included a thank-you note, asking if I was the redbird he knew from rassef. I said yes, and told him he can find me here these days. He said he's too busy for blogs not already in his reader, but that was a nice moment of contact.

On my way home yesterday, I squeezed into the elevator up from the subway platform with three strangers: one was using a cane, the other two were pushing strollers. There were two more women on the platform, one of them visibly pregnant, and room in the elevator for one; they gestured that they'd wait for it to come back. As the doors closed, one of the women with a stroller said something about "so young," sounding as though she thought the women were too young to need the elevator. I said, mildly, that you can't always tell, that I have a bad knee and maybe so does she. (And noted to myself that priority for the elevators is supposed to be disabled and elderly people, not strollers.) Maybe it will help. I don't carry a cane either, but my white hair seems to take me out of the "too young" box in the minds of people who think that young people aren't supposed to need (or admit needing?) any sort of accommodation.

I have bought a yoga mat, on the advice of the trainer I'm working with; it may make some of the stretches and exercises she's teaching me easier or more comfortable. It came with a free exercise DVD; I don't want the DVD, but they didn't have any without the DVD.

To brisingamen:

So far as I can see, all this does is to give the sea more ammunition to hurl further up the beach in other places, but I don't quite understand the complexities of refusing to accept the inevitability of longshore drift, so I am undoubtedly wrong about this.

Having studied this somewhat at university--it was a major interest of the professor who taught one general undergraduate intro at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies--I can tell you that you're basically right. In eastern North America, it's not longshore drift, it's that barrier beaches are trying to move inland (because the sea level is rising). This has been going on for millennia, but in the last several decades, it's been impeded by roads and ocean-view homes and a general human refusal to admit that we have built our houses upon sand.

Piling extra sand on beaches is essentially harmless but expensive, and has almost no long-term effect, because the currents carry the sand where they will. Everything else that's been tried to prevent barrier beach erosion makes things worse: it doesn't solve the problem locally, and it stops the beachs down-current from being naturally replenished. Spend enough money and you can turn a delightful sandy barrier beach into a rocky shoreline.

[Herewith ends the rant; also available, discussions of craters left by American bombing in Vietnam; and the pleasures of being on a beach on a pleasant cool day in April, when almost nobody else is.]

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In customers_suck, in response to someone who suggested that their employer shouldn't have hired mentally retarded people because those employees might make some customers uncomfortable:

If another employee can't deal with a (mentally or physically) disabled person, the employee who can't deal is free to look for another job.

Similarly, your customers are entitled not to be harassed. That doesn't mean they are entitled not to see people they aren't comfortable with. If an employee makes people uncomfortable by hassling them, touching them inappropriately, or the like, they need to be retrained, reassigned, or fired. Any employee. If s/he's just doing the job, and a customer is uncomfortable because the customer has never met a mentally retarded person, or a person of a particular ethnicity, before, the customer needs to take a deep breath and go on about their shopping.

If companies don't hire disabled people (or whites, blacks, women, Christians, non-Christians, fill in the blank) because they're afraid people won't have previous experience with the disabled, how are the temporarily able-bodied going to get that experience?

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To noelfigart:
I read the pagan names post, and looked at my username, and smiled. I'm not very pagan these days, but my more-or-less-totem bird is a brightly singing seed-eater.

I've given up on guessing whether people's names were chosen by themselves or by someone else: how, unless you know them well enough to be told, can you be sure, in a world where people hand innocent children names like "Prince" and "River Phoenix"? It seems kinder to assume, when someone has a boastful name, that they are burdened by foolish parents rather than excessive arrogance.

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To ladysisyphus, who was commenting on a man who wants to restore the primacy of the 19th-century meaning of "gay":

I'd be more sympathetic to this cause if most of the other words with similar meanings hadn't also been chased out of common usage by "happy". "Merry" is barely allowed out in public without "Christmas", "joy" is rare, "cheerful" almost a stereotype, and when's the last time you heard a person (other than Santa Claus) or event called "jolly"?

At least we still have "glee" and "pleasure".