Monday, March 02, 2009

on hope

After struggling for months I have finally found some relief. Enough that I can start writing again.
Sometimes I just give up for a little while and sit on the couch awaiting rescue. I don't know if it is depression or just the constant pain that grinds me down to a tiny version of myself.
The only problem with beginning to feel better is the realization that I have nothing.
Nothing to do all day, no job, no school. Just hours to fill.
Being disabled doesn't mean you are disabled from everything but it's hard to explain that to anyone because it doesn't fit what they have decided to believe.
They and by they I mean the doctors, the insurance, the employment and the family all make up their minds that disabled means unable to do.
You become defined by the list of things you can no longer do and no one including me thinks to start paying attention to the things I can still do. My brain still functions quite well on my good days but for my employer that isn't good enough. I can't blame them but I can still wish their could be some flexibility to their thinking.
I still have something to offer but no one wants what I am selling because it comes with strings.

Soon I will have to experience the grotesquery of the NEL. The NEL is non economic loss settlement. They say it is not for your pain and suffering it is just an award for what you have lost.
It comes in a percentage. A percentage that represents what has been taken from you and will never be returned.
so how do I explain this to some nameless, faceless accountant?
What percentage do I get because my bladder and bowels are at best unreliable? They are anatomically correct, they are not physically broken even when you look at them close up...the secret is only revealed when the nerves are stimulated and they respond with a big wet raspberry and work when they want to in their own time. So what percentage is that?
Do we take one week and multiply the normal by the abnormal?
How about pain? How disabled am I by pain? When I have bad pain I am 100% disabled from it.
When my meds are working well my pain becomes just background noise , is that 10%?
When I walk or sit for more than thirty minutes it takes an hour of laying down to cool the pain but then I am back up again...how can this be quantified? What algorithm exists that rates your pain in percentage points?
What kind of monster sat down to create this work of mathematical lunacy?
And of course there is a trick in all of this. A trick to punish and destroy.
If this diabolical accountant decides that your award is zero you are then cut off entirely from all support despite everyone agreeing you are "disabled".You are just not disabled enough to quantify or maybe you are too disabled to quantify......
You have no choice in this either. You can not say "no thank you, I have no interest in playing pick your number". You must submit.
And that is what it's all about right?
First you submit to your injury and you submit to the care of your doctors and then you submit to your employer,your insurance and yourself.
Now I submit to my pain, my inability to move when I want to, the "drug interactions" that lead to "side effects" and I submit to the people who pay me so I can continue to be paid, so I can pay for the medications that grant me that one bright day.

I have no choice but to submit and that is what being disabled means, submission.
I would make a great nun or priest, I can submit so well you would think I was co-operative.

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