braintissue

My husband suffered a massive heart attack Christmas week of last year. In that time he has managed to apply for SSI and be denied and now we are smack in the middle of an appeal, an appeal that he is scared will be yet another denial.

I am aware that some people do return to work after they have suffered a heart attack, but when the doctors you depend on are not very clear in the way that they deliver their message about the condition of their patients, and those patients go with the idea that they can and might go back to work, finding out that they can never return to a job they love is something that not only the heart attack victim goes through.

I love this person very deeply, but even I have my limits. Yet I know and understand why it is that he is so angry, so bitter at the same time that he is depressed, down on himself, thinking thoughts that none of us wants to deal with, especially now in the middle of what seems like hell to the rest of the family. I could sit here and do what other people who write about this have done, but then there is just one more person who knows just as much as anyone else does (nada, if you think about it.) My mission as a writer is not only to entertain you but to inspire you to do things that you know will help the rest of those people who are going through the same things we are.

Doing what I am doing, not for fame, but because it is right to do

Applying for Social Security benefits is a pain in the ass. There are so many forms to fill out, so many different things that need to be disclosed and so many reasons why the SSA will deny your claim for benefits. I don’t want to sound like one of those …wives… who feel like their pain is what the world needs to know about when in fact it is the pain of a man who was able to take care of his family for many years only to be taken down by something like a heart attack. People work all their lives so that they can be taken care of by a system which they pay into. Once they need this help it is almost impossible to get because there are too many people who have no clue about what they are looking at who could not care less than they do about the person filing a claim to what is rightfully and should rightfully be, theirs.

The whole thing about applying for and getting denied your benefits is that the SSA feels you can work and will deny your claim because they feel, regardless of what a trained medical professional says, you can still work.

What the hell happened to compassion, to caring for the people who helped fund this nation, and when was it made OK that we would turn our backs on the people who have, for years, cared for the country simply by having a damned job?

The time is now for action

We need to stop the madness of red tape and denial that people who need the help cannot get because they can still work. This is wrong. For generations we all were given to the idea that we could work our whole lives and if something goes wrong we can depend on what we paid into to be there to take care of us, but this is the furthest thing from truth. What we get instead are a bunch of people who know as much as medicine as someone who is not a doctor knows. These are the people who are in charge of approving our application for disability insurance.

What happened to our believing that we could get through things because we paid into a system that promised us that we would have it to depend on? We cannot depend on our leaders to take care of us, and while we are out here in the real world people who need their disability cannot get it because they are not injured enough, sick enough, whatever enough, and daily people die waiting for their benefits to kick in so that they can live.

A little history

My husband likes to have a good time, and his entire life was wrapped around his ability to make a living. He had a heart attack, tried recovering as quickly as he could, paid attention to the calendar and when his appointments with all of his doctors were. It was the visit to his cardiologist that started this mess, and it will be several more before the mess has been completely fixed. He is waiting for his disability claim to be approved, and even though we applied for them back in January, we are still fighting a system which only does the very bare minimum for people. I have seen people with lesser issues get approved quickly, but when a man who has worked hard his whole life cannot get the help he needs from the government he paid for, a person tends to get a little bit angry.

In his case, he is a lot angry, and he should be. We have been jerked around, lied to, given on diagnosis after another, one opinion after another, written statements saying that my husband cannot work at all. We have had no income that is steady in eight months, and with three kids, a car payment, prescriptions that are not covered by the state’s insurance plan, having no income that is sustainable is very hard on a person, let alone a family. We are falling apart at the seams, constantly arguing over the most trivial things and everyday we wear each other down, grinding each others’ nerves on the gravel of disappointment and depression. Yet it never changes, and though we have enlisted the help of a disability advocate, the control still remains in the hands of a careless, faceless government that tells us everything is fine even though our outward reality tells us that the opposite is true.

In order for this all to change, we have to change it. We have to stop sitting around ruminating about what we should do and what we wish we could do and actually do something to change the way that things are. People who are sick should not have to worry about how they are going to care for their families. They should be able to live life a little better than by only their very wits. Life is hard enough, and when you get that letter of denial telling you that according to Social Security and their outdated charts and regulations, etc., etc., you are sick enough to no longer work when they say you are. I would like to see one of them come around and visit these people who live their lives precariously because they have to and not because they want to.

We cannot afford to even leave the house some days, and this is when it starts to get difficult for not only me, but also for the kids. The man is always in pain, always in the middle of an anxiety producing situation that leads us to fighting with one another over something that we really have no control over at all, and that is the part that sucks the most. He is a very sick man, and I know his time is very limited here. His cardiologist sent it in writing - he cannot work anymore, so just chill.

But we still have to wait until November 27 to get a yes or a no. How the hell are we supposed to live on waiting that long for something that should already have been determined as a no brainer? He cannot work because the risk of him dying at work is too great, and the jobs that he can get in the shape that he is in are not the ones that pay well enough to become the spouse’s 2nd income.

We need to stand up and fight for the rights of those who are very surely becoming that crowd of people who daily are becoming that crowd that you only hear about in the news - the sick and the poor.

Any takers?