It's official

[pecunium]

I am a disabled vet.

The actual percentage is croggling, and the effects will be good, and (honestly) a bit life changing.

I am rated 80 percent disabled. I get a pension. If I read it right I also get PX privileges (I can go back onto the Presidio of Monterey again).

I don't know if it gets me schooling (I think I might be able to get some rehab money). I don't know what it gets me by way of tuition breaks in Calif.

I'll have to look into it.

It's a lot to digest.

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I was ready for being rated. I wasn't ready for the number. I was hoping for 30, would have been surprised at 20.

80... damnit I'm not that damaged.

Or something. Right now, however, I feel a trifle fragile.

It's a wierd sort of hope to have, becauase of it.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

80... damnit I'm not that damaged
Nope. But, after all your experiences, do you expect the military to get it right? Nice (for emotionally complex values of nice) that there's a mistake in your favor.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

In realistic terms... I'd have thought 30 percent a stretch.

Then again, I look at it in terms of what I've paid to earn this, and think it's just.

Then I look at other people I know, who have it as worse than I do, who are getting dicked, and I think I don't deserve it at all.

As others have said, it's complicated.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Did you send me a note about coming to the party? Someone did, and I can't recall whom, but there are only a couple of names which migh be it, and yours is one of them.

Your profile doesn't reveal proxmity, so I can't narrow it any better that way.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

Then I look at other people I know, who have it as worse than I do, who are getting dicked, and I think I don't deserve it at all.

Roger that.

As for your party, I am regrettably non-proximate.

[sylphslider.livejournal.com]

Then I look at other people I know, who have it as worse than I do, who are getting dicked, and I think I don't deserve it at all.

Survivor's guilt?

Take what you can, and fight for the rest. It's really the only way left open to any of us, any more.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

What she said. Managing to extract your rights from a fucked up system that denies them to others does not transform said rights into privileges.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

That's kind of what I was thinking. As for the guilt factor - the recognition for you does not actually hurt others; it may help them (or well, not help, but be an indicator of improvement), if it means the military is now starting to recognize the suffering of some of its people. At least it offers hope for others.

And congrats, for the parts of this for which those are appropriate.

[songblaze.livejournal.com]

For me, it was getting my permanent handicapped placard without a fight.

I had had a temporary placard. I was prepared to get another temporary, and have to keep getting temporaries every 6 months until they came up with an answer for why I was so sick.

When the neurologist I had been seeing at the time, who could tell me nothing more than that my problem was not neurological, filled out the form and checked permanent, I bawled. I was expecting to get a placard, but I wasn't expecting my doctor to say that I didn't need to be reassessed for 5 years because my condition was expected to be permanent. I'd had my secondary condition for 10 months, and before it struck I'd been in mostly good health (excluding the high rate of injury I had because of the primary condition). To have a doctor say that there was no expectation of significant improvement felt like...I can't explain it.

But yeah, it made me feel fragile, too.

And I got some of the same guilt feelings you did, as well. I think because so many people have to wrangle with their doctors to get these kinds of legal recognition, and all I had to do was present him with the form and say I wanted it. As someone else said, the fact that I got my recognition comparatively easily doesn't turn my new rights into privileges. Same goes for you.