Angel Anna

While the attention of the nation is focused on the prolonged death of Terri Schiavo, I'd like to herald the passing of one of our nameless saints.

Last week, three childhood friends of mine became orphans when their mother, Anna, finally joined her husband. 

What can I say about "Ma T"?  She was a mother-figure to most of the teens in our church.  As a four-eyed redheaded outcast, she made me feel loved, accepted, and normal ... Ma and two of her kids were redheads, too.  I felt as comfortable with her and her family as I did in my own home -- sometimes more so.  Always there with a helping hand for whatever needed doing at church, including hand washing and drying hundreds of communion glasses, and always ready to listen to whatever kid needed to pour their heart out.  Most of us considered Chris, Joanne and Andrew the luckiest kids around to have her for their mother for real, as opposed to the many of us for whom she was a surrogate.

She raised her kids right -- I remember one of Chris' teachers commending Ma T because during a school riot, Chris stayed behind to protect his female teacher and insisted that a gentleman could do nothing less.  Andrew, despite being a couple years younger than my crowd, occasionally provided the mature "conscience" we needed when we were cutting up in the lobby just before church started.  Though I hung out more with the boys when we were all living home, it was Joanne who kept in touch after I moved away.

I've been in California 25 years, but my memories of Ma T are as fresh as if she'd hugged me only yesterday.  A great lady, never to be forgotten.

 

OK, someone explain to me why Terri Schiavo can have $80,000/year of government money to keep her in a hospice, but a disabled person who is actually cognizant of being cold and hungry can't have $10,000/year of government money to pay the rent and buy food?

More on Schiavo:
http://journals.aol.com/sactoparalegal/LawPolitics/

Disability and Dignity

With respect to Terri Schiavo, Tom Harkin said that disabled people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

Oh, really? Harkin needs to talk to the federal employees who run the disability benefit system. Although criminal law requires "innocent until proven guilty", the Disability system apparently considers you guilty of fraud until proven innocent. I testified to the God’s honest truth – I wouldn’t do anything else under penalty of perjury – but because one doctor chose to illegally write false information in my medical records, unsupported (and even contradicted) by any other medical records, the judge concluded that my testimony (which agreed with the other doctors’ reports) was a lie.

Why was I, as a disabled person, not accorded the minimal respect of being believed? With as little as Disability pays – the average payment is less than the average rent around here – there are very few people who would "do it for the money". Unless you have a trust fund, or a working spouse (and I have neither), there’s no way you could survive on what Disability pays, so why automatically assume that everyone who applies for Disability is faking? You’d have to be pretty desperate to consider a few hundred bucks a month to be "hitting the lottery". (We’ll discuss that indignity later.)

This time around, I went in with reports from several doctors who were paid to say that I am fully-capable of working, and even they noted disabling limitations. I went in with an off-the-charts blood test. And even so, felt like I was a criminal trying to defraud the system, rather than being treated with respect and having my testimony believed. I’m in the uncommon position of having been a notary – the government thoroughly investigated me a few years ago and determined me to be honest – but the Disability system ignores my reputation and the opinion of the state government that my morality is above suspicion, and treats me like a common criminal for daring to think I deserve some of the money that I’ve paid into the system all these years.

Yes, disabled people deserve dignity and respect. Let’s start with the government treating Disability applicants in a dignified and respectful manner, abiding by the "innocent until proven guilty" credo required in every other court in the land.

Clinical Trial Update

The clinical trial coordinator reports that not only has my C Reactive Protein not gone down, it's gone UP since last week. So, I'm out of the clinical trial. The good news is, I now have off-the-charts blood tests to prove to Disability that there really is something very wrong, and it's physical, not psychological.

Now I need to talk to my doctor to find out if there's anything we can do about it. From a look at WebMD, it sounds like you can do something (antibiotics) if it's an infection, but if it's inflammation from arthritis/bursitis/tendinitis (all of which I have), then they can't do diddly-squat.

Yet another unethical action in my lawsuit. After quoting me a price of nearly $3 a page for a copy of my deposition, they told a friend that their normal charge for copies is $1 a page. This after telling me that they had been instructed not to send me a copy of the transcript. The question arises, was this a misunderstanding, or did the other lawyer tell them to make it difficult for me to have the copy I'm legally entitled to?
Given the many unethical things the lawyer has done already, I wouldn't put it past her to do that.

Clinical Trial in Limbo

Got to go back to the doctor this afternoon. I may be too sick to participate in the clinical trial. They did a C Reactive Protein test, which no one's ever done before, and it's off the charts. If we can't get a more normal result today, I don't get to participate in the trial.

OTOH, I have, for free, a test result that can be submitted to Social Security to support my claim that there *is* objective evidence that I'm physically ill, just the quack didn't want to do any test that would force him to accept that I have a physical illness, not depression over being a middle-aged, overweight divorcee.

Of course, if I were depressed over the divorce (not likely, since I was singing in the office after filing it), it would have been 2 years earlier, when I filed for divorce. And if I were depressed over losing my job, that wouldn't explain my symptoms before being fired.

So, even if I don't get to participate in the trial, I did get some benefit from it, and my lawyer can argue that this is yet one more place where a test that should have been done, wasn't, because the doctor didn't want to risk proving that I'm physically ill. He wanted to deny my disability claim, not help me get it.  He simply didn't note the symptoms that would prove it's not depression, even the ones necessary to make the CFS diagnosis were eliminated, which makes it real clear that he wasn't trying to help me support a disability claim for CFS. He wanted to believe I was depressed soooo badly that he was willing to break the law by falsifying medical records.

*Sigh*

To get into the clinical trial, I had to go through the whole fibromyalgia diagnosis procedure again: they apply 10 pounds of pressure (pressing till your thumbnail turns white) on 18 different points.  I had severe pain in all of them.  Then they have a little device called a dolorimeter that measures exactly how much pressure it takes to invoke pain.  On some points, I couldn't take more than 1.5 pounds (remember, it takes 10 pounds to make the diagnosis, so I'm way more sensitive than required).

Everyone in the study will be on placebo at some point.  This is apparently my week.  Either that, or this stuff is a complete flop as a sleeping pill.  I'm still wide awake in the middle of the night.  We'll find out Monday if the second package of pills works better.