Posts Tagged ‘disability’

02
May
2020

Since I have the chance to post before bed…

categories: consoles; word count: 392 words

I would be gaming more if I didn’t have… well, migraines. But the good news is that I see my neurologist at the end of the month to get refills on the medications of mine that need refills, and I tell him which medications of mine are no longer therapeutic and no longer work in the hopes that my medication regimen can be altered to make them more therapeutic. I already know that for reasons that I will be mentioning in this blog later, as soon as we can have it ordered and insurance approves it, I will be wearing an ambulatory EEG — my goal is to wear it “until we catch what we need to catch”, so I’m hoping that insurance actually lets me do that. I’ve never done an ambulatory EEG, and what we need to come up I don’t want to have hide.

I’m hoping that the pandemic doesn’t stall insurance approval of that request, and that my new Medicaid HMO actually approves that request. There’s also the possibility of having another CT scan done with contrast, which my neurologist had been wanting my old Medicaid HMO to do for awhile that they kept arbitrarily denying for the most asinine of reasons even though the first CT scan that was done under my first neurologist actually found something that she (and now, my new neurologist, since she decided not to come back to work after maternity leave) wanted to follow up with… I mean, if the initial CT scan actually found something one might think that insurance would approve a CT scan with contrast to find out more about it, and quite possibly subsequent scans to follow it, but my old Medicaid HMO was arbitrarily denying all subsequent requests for more than the initial scan, which was just absurd. So I guess we will see how this goes if my current neurologist decides to put in a request for another scan, assuming he didn’t give up there.

In the interim, I have noticed that we are actually running low in space on our microSD card, although I don’t want to take that out because our Animal Crossing game is on that and I don’t want to run the risk of corrupting our save data given that we have gotten fairly far in that game. I have heard horror stories…

13
Apr
2020

I need to come up with better titles for these.

categories: personal, RPGs; word count: 387 words

Good news: I am starting to get the hang of the “turnip exchange” in Animal Crossing, so over the course of several days, I actually completely paid off Tom Nook for the first time ever by doing all of the renovations on our house in this game and getting them all done and out of the way. Bub seems to like this game a lot, although he prioritizes certain things over others. I also laid down one of the best bridges in the game (Best Bridge For Bub!) and it should be built tomorrow since I paid the full Bell cost for it. We’ll see how that goes when I boot the game up tomorrow morning and… see whether or not it has actually been built. And so far, on our island there has never been an exceptionally good turnip sale price, so we’ve always been at the mercy of other people’s islands to sell turnips over there. I wish we would, at least once, peak with a good price. I’d probably give our island’s Dodo Code out to good friends of mine to start with before I took advantage of more official sites like the Turnip Exchange, even though I’ve used it myself to travel to other islands with higher turnip sale prices. I’m still getting my feet wet over there with the whole process, because on busier islands it takes awhile what with the whole game pausing whenever someone enters or exits, heh.

People are still panic buying certain things during this pandemic, which has made shopping a bit amusing.

Some of my friends have begun to get the economic stimulus payment (“Coronavirus check”), and we haven’t yet, but I’m waiting to see when we get ours since there’s me and two dependents to be tabulated.

Apparently Social Security re-routed my most recent disability application for a hearing, and this one won’t be held in person due to the distance. I anticipate just plain having to fight them until one of two things happens… I eventually get approved for disability benefits (SSI), or I give up. I don’t want to have to give up.

Chronic, intractable migraines are still my primary disabling diagnosis at present.

I would be doing a lot more (like even playing video games more frequently, seriously) if I didn’t have these.

20
Feb
2020

Neurological medications that I am currently on.

categories: personal; word count: 273 words

Since I mentioned this in a previous post, I thought that I would get around to making that whole list.

Right now, I do not feel like triptans help out a whole lot, and would like to switch to low-dose narcotics at some point. Due to the severity of my asthma, I can not safely take any NSAIDs without risking prednisone.

I also require prior authorization for Trokendi and for some of my triptans (it seems Zomig requires it now).

Maintenance medications
Trokendi, 300mg: Anything with topiramate as the active ingredient is almost never without side effects, as I have learned. I take these (200mg + 100mg) at night, which lessens the side effects, and that helps… a bit.

Abortive medications
Fioricet: I find that this one works the best, although one dose is never enough.
Imitrex injections: These are rife with side effects, so I only use these when necessary.
Olanzapine, single dose: These help with really severe migraines, but they make me really tired.
Promethazine/tizanidine: These are for nausea and muscle spasm, respectively, and they are to be taken with whatever abortive medication that I give myself as necessary for each of those symptoms (and they generally are with severe migraines). Although I am growing more tolerant of them, I’m still hit out of the blue with the occasional side effect of tiredness. However, they do help ameliorate those specific symptoms, so…
Zomig dissolvable melt/nasal spray: I have to fight insurance due to prior authorizations on these, and they do help when I can’t give myself Fioricet, but they are not particularly good at ameliorating a lot of the pain.

11
Feb
2020

So far, my reasons for disability denials…

categories: personal; word count: 299 words

· you have a STEM degree (an associates’ in Biology obtained before the onset of any disability)
· you’re intelligent, so you can adapt to work (when my disabilities are all physical)
· “your functional limitations line up with your neurologist’s report on you, but we still believe you can work”
· the migraine aborters actually work 100% at taking all migraine pain away, so I “can work”
· “you may have some limitations” (ha), “but you can adapt to work” (and absolutely no work is listed)

I had a friend whose mother had to apply for disability for them four separate times while they were a child, just to get them approved. That was four separate applications that she had to put in. Another case that I heard about was the friend of several friends waiting for a hearing after having been denied twice, just to die in her sleep. And I read about someone who had to advance it to a hearing for leukemia, at which point they were approved, but they died soon after because they could not start therapy for their cancer in time to save their life. This is literally what disabled people in the United States have to deal with. They have to put in application after application, or advance it to a hearing and wait up to two years to get in front of an administrative law judge, hoping that they can hold their heads above water while they do, also hoping that they don’t actually die before disability benefits are granted. Like I’ve mentioned before, 13,000 people die per calendar year here because they actually are disabled and they kept being denied benefits. That is one hell of an “oops”. I’m starting to think that it’s intentional on the part of this country, a feature, not a “bug”.

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