This is a travesty worth pointing out.

13,000.

That is roughly how many people actually die every year in the United States because they apply for disability benefits (SSDI or SSI) and are denied, sometimes continuously. That’s thirteen. Thousand. People.

They die for a number of reasons.

Lack of access to healthcare and medication.

Inability to afford housing.

Not being able to buy themselves food.

The list goes on, but I’m sure I’ve made my point by now.

Roughly two-thirds of applicants are denied when they submit their initial application, and a staggering 80% of applicants are denied if they request that Social Security reconsider their application. For those who choose to advance their application for benefits to a hearing with an administrative law judge after this second denial, the wait to get in front of a judge in some capacity can take up to two years in some states, and between half and 60% of applicants have their benefits approved at that stage… so no matter how you look at it, the odds do not exactly appear to be in your favor (although older individuals seem to have an easier time obtaining and securing disability benefits for themselves, and I’m told that children who “age onto the rolls” as adults seem to have a slightly easier time depending on just what their disabilities are).

And some of them die right after getting approved after having literally fought the system for years.

They die because they weren’t able to access the things that they needed in time because they had to fight to get what they were rightfully owed. They count here. Their stories are still important. Just as important.

This may not surprise very many of you given the… political climate in the United States, at least as far as it relates to healthcare, but it will probably sadden and shock those of you who are not familiar with the number, but that is the number. Because people with legitimate disabilities who are not able to work are being denied for sometimes the most contradictory, superfluous reasons, approximately thirteen thousand people die in the United States every year as a result of that, and to me, that is thirteen thousand people (or however many people actually die in the United States as a result of this) too many. I almost want to laugh — and sometimes I actually do — when people say, “oh, you’re disabled, just apply for disability” as though it were really that simple. I’m not sure if the system is intentionally set up to be like this or what. It may well be.

I’ve been able to log my sleep with the FitBit!

Now that I’m used to sleeping with the FitBit on my wrist (although the itchiness hasn’t… quite gone away, and I don’t ever expect that it will completely go away), I’ve been able to log my sleep with it and how much time I spend in the various stages of sleep. According to one night, I spent approximately 14% of that night “awake”, 19% of it in the REM stage of sleep, 45% of it in light sleep, and 22% of it in deep sleep. Surprisingly, most of my deep sleep was toward the start of the night. I’m wondering if any of the medications that I have to take would have anything to do with my sleep patterns, but I suppose we’ll be finding that out in the coming months as FitBit continues to store more sleep data for me and I have a chance to look at more of it.

Based on the reading that I’ve done on it, FitBit’s ability to track one’s sleep is actually pretty accurate… or so that’s what a lot of people say, especially those who have used FitBit to track it and then have gone on to have their sleep actually studied at the hospital or in a lab. So I continue to hold out hope in a good way, heh.

Once I get some more nights logged with it, I’ll be sure to take a few screenshots and post them up here.

Screenshots of my 23andMe results.

These are recent screenshots of my ancestry composition as… estimated by 23andMe, or however you would word that. Of course, the only thing that I omitted from the screenshot was my full name, which would have shown up to the left of the 100% percentage on both screenshots. In hindsight, given that my full name can be found on our Amazon wish list if anyone purchases anything off of it, and the link can be found on the right side of my blog… maybe I didn’t need to crop it out, but since it’s a picture that can theoretically be saved to someone’s computer, I don’t exactly mind having done so. At any rate, all of these ancestry kits seem to say something completely different, which will illustrate itself when I post the screenshot that I have of my Ancestry results. I thought that those would be a lot more varied, as I’ve seen friends’ results where they have a lot of different percentages broken down and a lot more detail… and then you have mine, which I will eventually be getting to, which is a lot more boring and dull in comparison. At least my 23andMe is more interesting, even though more than half of my ancestry starts with “Broadly” and doesn’t get more specific…

I knew this side effect would reveal itself…

Setting the FitBit up was a breeze, especially syncing it to the app that I have for it.

On the other hand, what hasn’t been a breeze has been the fact that my immune system is back to what it normally likes to do when it gets bored… so the feeling of the strap on my wrist, even though I tried to place it as comfortably as possible, is bothering me because all it seems to do is itch. I need to find some way to get over this or, at the very least, ameliorate this symptom. But should I really be surprised? This post is, after all, being written out by the very same person who has chronically rejected all piercing attempts made (three earlobe piercings), who had to have a medical implant moved because her body chronically rejected that to the tune of an emergency room visit. It’s still annoying that my immune system, as with my disabilities, limits my life in the manner that it does. The least that some people can do is actually take it seriously when I say that it does that. Because I am bound and determined to make this Inspire HR function in my life, damn it…

One of the things that I have tried doing is to move it around on my wrist as best as I am able to without making it so that it can’t read vital signs, and on occasion, taking it off of my wrist for short periods. There’s also the fact that I take it off of my wrist anyway when it needs to be charged. But based on the use that I’ve gotten so far out of it, the Inspire HR does hold a decent charge… the only functional limitation as far as actually using it goes is the itchiness that persists when it is worn “too long”, but that’s not the fault of the FitBit itself as much as it is the fault of my immune system being like a bored, petulant, small child. Seriously.

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