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

[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.