Cold Hard Reality

In the past couple of days I've read Molly Ivins' Bill of Wrongs and John Grisham's The Innocent Man, and I think I've had my dose of cold hard reality for a little while. But before I retreat to my hammock to read pulp fantasy novels, I just have to comment on this post at Obsidian Wings, "Unless a Solder Has a Personal Fortune...". The post quotes an Army Times articles to emphasize how little disabled vets are left with after they're discharged; it amuses me that the article gets it so wrong, like while the writer wanted to bring some light to how vets are treated, she couldn't bear to actually admit just how bad it can be. Hence, this quote:

(I)njured service members are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow. (...)

Most permanently disabled veterans qualify for payments from Social Security and the military or Veterans Affairs. Those sums can amount to about two-thirds of their active-duty pay. But until those checks show up, most disabled veterans draw a reduced Army paycheck.

It gives the impression that a disabled veteran, upon leaving her military base with discharge papers, receives a reduced paycheck until the VA and/or SSA get their shit together to evaluate that veteran. And once the VA does evaluate that vet, which happens within a year, she can expect to actually get two-thirds of her active duty pay. And this is supposed to be an example of the system failing- which I guess it is. It makes me wonder if the writer even realizes that this horrible scenario of hers is orders of magnitude better than what happens to many, many vets.

Just to be clear: I have never heard of a vet receiving a reduced Army paycheck after discharge. Maybe that happens if you get a certain disability rating from the Army on discharge; when I was discharged, I got a zero rating from the military board although I was only able to work part-time at a civilian desk job at the time, and I was told that the military board often gave soldiers zeros when they deserved much higher disability ratings. The policy was to give soldiers as little as possible from the Army and just let the VA deal with them. So maybe you get a bit of an Army paycheck if you're a combat amputee or something, but your average disabled vet doesn't.

So you get out of the Army with maybe some severance pay, a few thousand dollars or so, and it takes the VA 3-4 months to get you into the system so you can apply for disability benefits from the VA, and then the VA takes a year or so to decide your claim. But the VA also has a policy of minimizing payments for disability, and so its quite likely that if the VA even admits that your medical problems are service-connected, they'll minimize your symptoms, and therefore your payments, as much as possible-or more. (The most recent example of this in the news was the hearing on VA administrators directing their subordinates to find that vets with PTSD had "adjustment disorder" in order to save on compensation costs.)

So you've been out of the military for a year, not working because of your disability, and you get a disability rating of 30% or 40%. So you appeal, but appeals don't have a time limit at the VA- they have no incentive to process your claim, so it gets tossed on a pile, and maybe a couple years later someone looks at it. If you're lucky, that someone will take the facts into account and get you the compensation you need; if you're not lucky, they won't, so you appeal again and the wait starts all over- and you're still living on $512/mo.

This is what really happens, this is how vets are really treated. It destroys people's lives and is an absolute disgrace; it irritates me that all anyone talks about are best case scenarios.

A Gorilla on the Road

There was this post for BADD, by Mary at This Is My Blog, comparing having a disability with having a gorilla living in your house with you. I find it a very apt description of the process of "taming" your illnesses and injuries until you're able to cope with them in a practical way. Anyone interested in a vivid illustration of what it means to cope with a disability should read that post.

I think in the past year I've come along way in managing my life. It's helped that I haven't been putting pressure on myself to go out and get a regular job and fit into a regular life; in some ways getting the Voc Rehab people to admit that I'm not rehabable has improved the quality of my day-to-day life. I've been able to allow myself to slow down and take all the time I need to get places and do things, but more importantly, I've changed the things I try to do.

And now it's summertime, the time I feel the best, and I'm contemplating taking my new openness to life onto the next level. I've written here before about my desire to travel, and about my poverty due to the VA's denial of the reality of my condition, and now these two things have come together fortuitously. My husband and I will soon be out a place to live due to various factors, and my tentative plan is to start a grand journey, camping out of my car and exploring the world a little bit at a time. My gorilla and I are going on the road.

First stop will be my parents' house outside of Seattle, possibly for several weeks, and then I hope to head south. The trip from here to Washington will take me several days; its my trial run to make sure that I can actually handle sleeping in the back of my VW and driving around strange places without getting too stressed out. Maybe the trial run will fail and I'll be stuck living in my parents' attic or something, but I have high hopes, and faith in my hard-won coping skills.

I also hope that this may help my husband. Quite frankly, while I have made friends with the gorilla in our house, he hasn't. It would have never occurred to me, before, that the person with a seriously life-altering physical event could adapt to the changes in their life better than someone who just has to sit and watch the person affected. But a gorilla in the house fixated on your housemate is still a gorilla in your house, I guess, and he's had a hard time. I hope that giving him some time where I'm not sitting around being sick at him may help him out.

I realize that all my high hopes may be a little foolish, brought on by sunny days and a desire to choose to be optimistic, but even if things go horribly wrong, I'll still have a nice visit with my family and some neat photos to share when I get onto a computer again. My sister's cat had kittens like two days ago, so when I get there they'll be a week and a half-ish old. Honestly, I'm about as excited to see those kittens as I am to see the rest of my family, how sad is that?

I am the stuff of happy endings

Arches National Park, Utah

Goblin Valley State Park, Utah

Quite a few years ago, my family and I visited Moab, Utah. Possibly more than once, for probably more than a week- I don't remember exactly. I've been thinking, though, that it would be neat to go there again. The past couple of weeks we've been packing up stuff in this house so that we can have a giant garage sale, clearing things out so the house can be sold. Grandma is finally accepting that she needs to live in assisted living care, so the house is going to pay for that, which means Michael and I are out a place to live.

Things are kind of dissolving into chaos at the moment, but I'm oddly OK with it. Its occurred to me that not actually having a place to live might be just the excuse I need to take the roadtrip of all roadtrips. Not that gas prices this summer are conducive to roadtripping, but the idea of just taking off and seeing where I end up is incredibly enticing. And if I were to do this, I would go to Utah first I think. I could sleep in the back of my car, and spend days slowly creeping about these gorgeous canyons, maybe bring a sketchbook and work on pretending I'm an artist.

The practical, responsible me thinks that this is a very bad idea for any number of reasons, but on the other hand, it's not like I have a job or anything holding me to a specific place. I am interested in seeing the world, and although I am sick and poor these days, I don't have any particular reason to think that I will be less sick or poor five years from now, so if I'm going to travel anytime, why not now?

When I am king

Sitting in my email inbox right now is a letter from a caseworker at the VA Regional Office of Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, St Louis (Voc Rehab). This is the office that works with veterans who are disabled by a condition caused by their military service in order to retrain them for the workplace and help them find employment by providing things like assistive devices: voice recognition software, specialized wheelchairs or whatever you need in order to get back to work. They also do things like paying for college if they think that's what you need to be a productive member of society, or small business planning advice and loans. Voc Rehab interviewed me in January to see if there was anything they could do for me, a disabled veteran.

The letter in my inbox confirms that a paper copy of my official rejection letter will be sent to me as soon as possible so I can add it to my medical and employment history. The VA office here has found that I am unemployable, not rehabable, not worth spending tax dollars on, so I am not eligible for their program at this time. Incidentally, they made this decision in January, told me they sent me the letter in January, and are only now getting around to resending it.

There is another VA office in town, Disability Compensation and Pension (Comp & Pen). This office is tasked with taking care of veterans who have been disabled by their service; and by 'taking care of' I mean 'giving money to.' This is the branch that gives out disability payments, which are scaled based on the severity of disability from almost negligible, something like $110/month, to completely disabling, over $2k/month. If your disability is so severe that you can't find any kind of employment, you are officially entitled to the full 100% disability payments, which gives you about $25k a year to live on. It's not money that anyone would call riches, but at least it's above the poverty line.

You would think, that since the branch of the VA responsible for helping veterans find employment has found that I am unemployable- and this particular office is the fourth in two states, on the state, federal, and nonprofit levels, to find this- the Comp & Pen branch of the VA would be obligated to also find me unemployable, and therefore give me disability payments that I can live on. Well, you would think that IF you don't know the way the VA works. So here I am, poking at my library account online, bored because someone else has all the Buffy DVDs checked out and I can't afford to buy them so I must wait, contemplating the day when I am no longer able to access the internet from my home because my savings will have run out and I will no longer be able to afford internet access. In my bleaker moments, I contemplate a day when I will no longer have a home from which to not access the internet; but I know that this will probably never happen, because I have family. But if I didn't have family... it already would have. The VA provides me with enough to have a nice car to live out of.

All of which leads me to comment on this article that's been floating around, from the Christian Science Monitor: "Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?" Basically some former athlete white boy with a college degree and rich parents went out to prove that it's possible to go from being homeless to renting a place, even if you're ... a young, healthy, rich white boy with a college degree. Some choice quotes:

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family.

"I was getting by on chicken and Rice-A-Roni dinner and was happy."

"I had a credit card in my back pocket in case of an emergency. The rule was if I used the credit card then, "The project's over, I'm going home.""

[In response to a question about whether his game would have been more difficult if he had child support payments or was on probation] "The question isn't whether I would have been able to succeed. I think it's the attitude that I take in."

"This isn't a "rags-to-riches million-dollar" story. This is very realistic. I truly believe, based on what I saw at the shelter ...that anyone can do that."

Speaking as someone who doesn't have the luxury of "quitting" my life when someone gets sick, who doesn't have an emergency credit card or any "previous contacts" that would do me any good, I just have to say that eating chicken and Rice-a-Roni for dinner sounds like the lap of luxury to me (meat is expensive, even chicken), and I deeply resent the implication that the reason I'm in the situation I'm in is because my attitude isn't focused enough on tugging at my own bootstraps. Yeah, I made some stupid decisions. I joined the Army- that was, in hindsight, blindingly stupid. But I'm not sick and unemployed because I'm lazy, and this kid's condescension makes me want to punch him in the face. Knowing that in the future people are going to point to the book he wrote as "proof!" that poverty is a choice that the government shouldn't subsidize with things like food stamps makes me want to puke.

There's a more eloquent takedown of this at Resist Racism: Playing at poverty.

Serving Your Country

Sometimes, when I feel like making myself feel sick- you know, when my GERD/IBS isn't doing that for me already- I contemplate my outstanding disability claims.

It's been two years now since I was medically discharged from the Army. As soon as I got out, I put in a disability claim for the stomach problems I had pretty much the whole last year I was in (and which I still suffer from). Throwing up all the time, cramps, bloating, gas and heartburn aren't enough to make you totally disabled, of course (although the esophageal cancer GERD can cause will often actually kill you), but the VA, unlike Social Security, grades disability on a percentage scale, and will often give small payments for minor things. A retired Sergeant Major I used to know gets 10% disability for a tiny scar on his ear; visible scarring is considered disabling, even if you can barely tell it's there. So I had a legitimate hope that even though I was not a Sergeant Major, someone in power would think that I was entitled to something for my constant illness.

It's been two years, and I still haven't heard back from the VA about whether or not I am entitled to disability on this matter. First they told me that because I didn't have a clear diagnosis, I didn't actually have anything wrong with me. I was tempted to go and vomit on the desk of the person who made that decision, but instead just appealed it. They got my appeal paperwork and treated it like a brand new claim, telling me that I would have to prove that I'd had the condition since I was in the military. Never mind that all of my medical records are either military or VA, I had to request copies- from them- and then provide them with those copies.

I'm back in the waiting phase, again. I suppose sometime they will have to make a decision, and I assume that if they even glance at my medical records, they will see that I'm entitled to compensation, because I am. I joined the military in good faith and got wrecked while trying to serve my country, and I know that that's true no matter how many bureaucrats deny it.

When I'm not vomiting bile (ha!) over frustration with the system, I daydream about what I could buy with the back pay I would get if the VA found in my favor. I am fully disabled by my fibromyalgia and unable to obtain or keep employment, according to two government agencies and one non-profit tasked with helping disabled people find work, but VA regulation only allows a finding of 40% disability for fibromyalgia, so I live on $556 a month. A finding of only 20% disability for my GERD/IBS, just one step up from a tiny scar on your ear, would net me back pay of $5400 for the two years I've been waiting.

There are a lot of things I could spend $5400 on, but I think my highest priority is dental care. I daydream about getting my teeth cleaned; I could even get a few cavities filled before that money ran out! Screw new clothes and a tattoo and a haircut from someone other than my mother, dental care is my big dream.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I hadn't joined the Army. I probably would have finished university a couple years ago, maybe gone on to post-graduate work if I found something that I found more interesting than the rest of the world. Maybe I'd be working at a real job, with health insurance and so on. Maybe not. Maybe I would still worry about not being able to save my teeth, maybe I would still be disabled in some way. There is definitely enough doubt in me, though, that whenever I see ads enticing young people to join the military, it makes me see red.