I can’t tell you how much stress I have been under since October when I got a letter in the mail stating that disability had decided I was no longer in need of their services and without any warning what-so-ever they booted me off insurance and benefits. Thank God I wasn’t living anywhere that needed rent, I would have been evicted!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I filed a disagreement with their decision and asked to be kept on benefits in the meantime. They asked me to see a state shrink and I complied. I thought I had a great rapport with this woman, she seemed to really understand that my issues weren’t my mental health, they were my physical <\/em>health which is spontaneous and angry. I felt good about the whole situation. And then I heard nothing. For months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, I was still stressed out under the threat of being booted off the system. No news is not always good news and I knew contacting them and asking what was up could also spell my doom so I didn’t. I have been out-of-my-mind stressed out from this situation to the point I haven’t been able to focus on anything. <\/em>I stopped reading, I stopped doing book reviews, I stopped writing, I didn’t even have the energy to keep up a presence on Twitter. Fucking Twitter. <\/em>And then I got a phone call stating that I was still under review and this time it’d be with “fresh eyes” as someone else took over my case. And I got a second <\/em>request to see a shrink, a different shrink, all while being asked to fill out form after form after form asking the same questions again and again. Well at this point I was getting hostile. One of the questions was about my migraines, “Do you know what causes them?” to which I scrawled out in hastily written chicken scratch, “Good grief, if I knew what was causing them I’d be avoiding it like the plague!” I was no less testy with shrink #2 who did a MUCH shorter exam. I was pretty out of it that day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So now I have received all my files back to help me prepare for the court appeal in a couple weeks. I read through them and I am fucking livid. Over and over and over again there are repeated requests to my normal doctors office for records and no evidence they ever sent anything <\/em>at any point making it look like I was not going or doing anything for myself. In addition to that there was the reports from the shrinks and the first one, the one I liked and tried so hard to be normal and friendly towards, was a complete dick to me saying repeatedly that in her opinion I was of high intelligence and could function just fine in a work setting. She made no <\/em>effort to say she meant this only in a psychological sense because my claim is and always has been for physical illness. <\/em>The second shrink said much the same, that mentally speaking I was fine to work, but also made sure to mention that this only applied to my mental state, not my physical state. THANK YOU. That’s all I needed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t know if I will be kept on the system or not. What I do know is that the paperwork they sent me and people I know to write out are SUPER consistent over the years – because I’m not fucking lying! I’m on disability because my stomach pains and migraines at complete random like to lay me up in bed for days at a stretch. This is not conducive to being able to work. <\/em>I don’t know what my triggers are and every doctor I have ever been to have labelled me a complete mystery so I have no real diagnosis. This doesn’t mean I pulling the claim out of my ass. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I am so fucking tired of fighting so hard for pennies. <\/em>The most the average person on disability can receive a month is $721. That’s 2\/3rds of a minimum wage job and we’ve already proved people cannot live on a single minimum wage job. I live with my parents because I don’t want to rely on having a romantic partner to have a roof over my head but they’re getting old and I am getting increasingly anxious about the situation. In addition to this I have zero <\/em>faith I will be able to stay on the system considering this is the second <\/em>time they’ve tried to dump me off it. The first time didn’t get as far as a court review but this time… this time did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s not like I haven’t tried coming up with job ideas and making myself useful it’s just none of them have paid shit. Last month I made $5 on AdSense for my blogs. Last year <\/em>I made $24 in book sales on the three novels I spent 15 years writing. I’ve tried to sell my photography, my art, literally everything I do and I spend every second I am “OK” trying to produce something, anything<\/em>. And trust me being “above average intelligence” makes this just that much more frustrating when nothing pans out! So what am I going to do if they kick me for good? The only thing I can do to survive…. anything, until I burn out and go back to sleeping it off. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After more than 15 years on the system I’m still fighting to prove I actually do suffer greatly from an undiagnosed mystery illness. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[268,497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-living-with-chronic-fatigue-syndrome","category-medical-testing","wpcat-268-id","wpcat-497-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/06\/IMG_3498.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paOpxN-ka","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1252,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions\/1252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}