Posts Tagged ‘life’

23
Oct
2020

They want you to die so they don’t have to pay.

categories: personal; word count: 418 words

Soon, I will have a hearing with an administrative law judge to see if I can get approved for disability benefits… again. I’ve been told by friends of mine who are more familiar with the process (yes, the process) that the best thing to do is to put in applications, and advance them to hearings, until I am eventually approved, because Social Security wants people to give up and stop applying for benefits even though they are disabled and should not have to fight as hard as many of them do to receive benefits that they are otherwise entitled to. To make it easier on myself, I’ve begun to keep notes on my computer to remind myself of things that I want to say at my hearing even though it will be over the phone due to this pandemic. This is the same judge who has already denied me once when I put in an application for disability with my asthma as my primary disabling diagnosis… now, at the advice of my second neurologist, I’ve put in an application with chronic, intractable migraine disorder as my primary disabling diagnosis. If she remembers me, which she may, she will probably find some reason to deny me. I’m willing to play the game of putting in applications until I am eventually approved, as one of my friends’ mothers had to advance applications to a hearing four separate times to get them approved for disability benefits when they were a child on something that should not even have had to go to a hearing… that was how obvious this disabling impairment should have been to Social Security when their mother applied for them, but I digress. Seriously.

Another one of my friends said that they “deny, deny, deny” hoping that you pass away for people whose disabling conditions run the risk of death so that they do not have to pay out on any benefits. And I mean, I can get behind the deny, deny, deny part since that’s been what has been happening to me right now. I’ve been getting contradictory reasons for denial on my migraine diagnosis alone. Personally, I’m still trying to figure out how someone with between fifteen and twenty “migraine days” (yes, days) lasting between four and twelve hours who can’t even engage in hobbies that she wants to engage in to the extent that she wants to engage in them in can work, but whatever. Maybe if I keep putting in applications they’ll get it…

22
Oct
2020

“You’re intelligent, so you can adapt to work”.

categories: personal; word count: 248 words

· I have between fifteen and twenty days of migraine activity per month on average
· a lot of this has to do with how aggressively I avoid triggers, or how aggressively I can
· many of these come with nausea, which has to be worked around because… well, nausea
· wearing sunglasses when indoors does help, but this limits my vision as a result of doing so
· even being adherent to various maintenance medications, I still have at least fifteen “migraine days”

But yes. Anyone who thinks that I can “adapt to work” in spite of the migraines alone are deluding themselves. There are still people out there that actually think that I can hold down any “normal” job with the frequency and severity of migraines that I have when I can’t even indulge in video games on my off time to the extent that I would like. I have to meticulously plan out doing so around my already existing “migraine schedule” and the amount of medication that I have available to give myself at any one time, and I can not play for extended periods of time. If this is affecting what is probably my favorite hobby at this point, it is bound to affect my ability to find and keep a job. It still blows my mind that some people refuse to see this.

If I can find a job that I can do that “pays all of the bills”, I’d seriously jump on that in a second though…

20
Oct
2020

If it’s not one thing, it’s definitely another…

categories: personal; word count: 341 words

I think the charger for my FitBit… doesn’t exactly work as intended.

I have to hold it against the back of the Versa to get it to continue to charge, which kind of defeats the purpose of “set it and forget (about) it until it’s done charging”. Although I’m thankful that it works in terms of continuing to be able to charge it, I may replace the charger. And the strange thing was that the charger worked fine when I first began to use it, but for some strange reason as I continued using it as needed, that was when it worked less effectively, then not unless I firmly held the Versa to the charger… it’s one of those that the device “nestles in”, where you snap it inside of the charger and something on the front of it holds it to pins on the back where the charging actually takes place, if any of that makes sense. If only these devices weren’t so confusing, and if only these devices didn’t all come with their own individual charger that wasn’t compatible with anything else except for that individual device. That’s a long-standing pet peeve of mine…

Bub actually had another “act of God” with his AAC device, so that had to be sent back to the company that furnishes these for repairs. The screen is sturdy, but it’s not impenetrable, and he insists on taking the keyguard off of the device and hiding it in the house. Why he does this, I do not know. I don’t think he would have broken the screen on the device like he did if he had left the keyguard on, and no amount of trying to explain to him why he needs to leave the device’s keyguard on the device has even remotely been effective.

The good thing is that his insurance fully covers necessary repairs on it since it is his communicative device.

As I write this, I have the background music from Kickle Cubicle playing in my head for some strange reason.

18
Oct
2020

Do I do the thing now, or should I wait some?

categories: personal; word count: 293 words

One of the things that I bought myself with my economic stimulus payment was a manual treadmill that fit within my budget. Along with that, I also got a FitBit Versa Lite from someone who happened to be selling their used tracker on eBay for what was an extremely good price, and I didn’t need all of the bells and whistles that would have come with a Versa 2, so I sprung for that. Although it took me a bit of time to get used to the idea of sleeping with something on my wrist, the transition was surprisingly easy… but I’m attributing this to the fact that wearing the Versa Lite feels more like I’m wearing a slightly snug watch than anything else, and prior models of the FitBit didn’t quite feel like that when they were wrapped around my wrist. Coupled with the fact that this also tells me the time and lets me check the weather (which is good for planning when to do things, making sure that it’s not going to rain on those days), I do have to say that I’m actually a fan of the Versa series. On top of that, this one tracks my oxygen saturations at night… and being an asthmatic, why not be aware of those? Especially because I do tend to have nocturnal symptoms of it…

I’m still deliberating when the best time is to start those virtual races that I mentioned here in this, though. Do I want to acclimate to walking on this treadmill to the point that briskly walking a mile is as easy as it’s ever going to get for me, and then start? Or do I want to start now? I’m not sure. I’ll continue to mull it over.

15
Oct
2020

I don’t think I’ve ever actually mentioned it here.

categories: personal; word count: 328 words

You can kind of see it in the picture that I used for this most recent Wordless Wednesday, but I have what is called brachydactyly — an inherited condition that causes unusually shortened fingers (and in my case, it appears to be just my fingers that are affected, as my feet and toes seem fine). My form of it is not as severe as some people’s, which is why I “got away” with people thinking that I simply had small hands as I grew up… and a lot of people, even now, simply think that I have small fingers and hands. And although that’s the case, my fingers and hands — mainly my fingers — are abnormally small, especially in proportion to what they should be. The type that I appear to have, or the one that appears to most line up with the structuring of my hand, is Sugarman’s. I don’t completely fall in line with any of the listed types of brachydactyly even though you can tell that I have it, but of the various types, Sugarman’s brachydactyly is the one that most resembles my hand size. And again, I don’t have it as severely as some people… but I do have “small hands”.

Some people have also gone a step further than that and have described my hands as “small, weird hands”.

I’ve actually found that you can get away with more being, or passably presenting as, female, and being short or small. I didn’t find out until I was an adult that there was actually an explanation for my hands being the way that they were (and I didn’t even find this out until I found out why I could not adequately follow nail polish tutorials… of all of the reasons to find something like that out, huh?), let alone that it was an anomaly.

I’m sure some of you can imagine the relief that I felt finding out that there was a scientific reason for this.

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