Two things that make me angry
One personal one not, seem to have converged under “Background check consequences.”
I have a good friend whose medical status caused her to have to resign her last position ( due to a painful, ongoing disability) without notice. She has another job, but it’s part time no benefits. I firmly believe that when she applied for more than 100 jobs over the spring and summer, the reason she did not get a single one of them has to do with her credit score and her last employers admission that she is not eligible for rehire. (to protect themselves, of course they do not go into *why* ) Was she an extremely competent, well liked and award winning employee at her last job? Yes she was. But all that goes out the window because she committed the unpardonable sin of leaving without notice.
She’s living in one room in a rooming house. Has been for two years, and she cannot even use the kitchen there because it is one floor above her (thank God she’s on the same floor as the shower and laundry) She needs health insurance and at present cannot get it, and may not even be able to get anything affordable on the exchanges because there will be no Medicaid expansion in this state. Her car has died because she hadn’t the funds to repair it. She has type two diabetes, and uses busses and walks with crutches. She has lost the padding on the bottom of her feet for some reason and is literally skin and bone with every step. She also has severe diabetic neuropathy with no way to afford the Lyrica that would ameliorate that portion of her chronic pain.
Her disability claim was denied (!) so she keeps working, with the chronic pain that is constant and also keeps her dealing with insomnia, not to mention that fall and winter are coming and they will make bus travel extremely dangerous for her. Essentially, the consequences of a correctly run background check for her mean no chance to get a real apartment, a full time job, or healthcare at this time. All for the crime of leaving a job without notice because she was dealing with painful ongoing impairment.
Then there’s Aaron Alexis, the shooter in DC.
The consequences of the background check run on him for his contracting firm by another contracting firm, (Source: The Rachel Maddow Show), is that no one found or acted upon his history of mental health problems…so not only did he get to keep a job he never should have had access to without managing his mental health…the end result has been the deaths in DC.
Screw up with [your personal] money and leave a job too quickly and you never get a decent job again, apparently.
Have a visible ongoing record of mental health issues that made you a danger to yourself and others?
Work on, dude. Work on.
That’s fucking wrong. I don’t know how it can be fixed but it’s fucking wrong.
The Notes and All the Alterations
When it’s a good day, I don’t think “I’ve run out of positive and will just hide in the corner,” Instead I say “New paradigm ok, how to work with it, within it, not against it.”
And new paradigm with me almost always seemed to lead to diagnosis of a previously unknown long standing impairment or illness. I had five that were previously listed. Now one has been reclassifield and one is brand new.
So, like always, a personal history digression. Excuse it, but it’s one of these blog posts I have to get down, if only to get the chronology recorded for the next disability review.
1966-2010
“How could you possibly lose that? You just put it down! You can’t tell me you don’t know where it is? My sudden short circuits about where things are remains legendary. (That, and other characteristics of my professional and academic life have recently (2009) been brought out and presented to me as adult ADD. I have been dealing with that since I was five years old. Still diagramming how and whether to medicate.
And, it hit me at a pivotal point in my life, with very life changing and regretful results.
1988
A masters thesis in history was beginning to take hold of my brain…I’d finished two years of TA’ing. I had an outline. I had notes (pre computer on 3 x5 index cards) of the murky first draft that I wanted to do. I remember (and memory can play tricks of course) I remember putting a backpack full of notes and my husband’s Bible under my desk in the teacher’s assistance room.
When I went back, the backpack was gone. I searched my apartment, I had my mom search her home, I searched our car and my mother in law’s house.
Those notes the bible, the backpack itself… were never found, and I bailed. I was irrational about continuing at that point…to start from the beginning seemed impossible. It had which sources I would use, the outline etc.
So I did not become a history professor. In, part…because my brain short-circuited. Nothing was in there worth stealing, maybe I left them there earlier than I thought and they were taken as a “lost and found’ thing. I have no thought that anyone stole them. That way lies paranoia.
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And, the effects of an unknown aggravator of an existing impairment.
1983. Fell down a flight of stairs and probably damaged something internal l which I now believe was my gall bladder Have had specific constant back pain in the tissues ever since which has not been investigated properly ’cause, you know, I’m fat, and there was some diagnostics my insurance wouldn’t allow. In 1995 I was having a massage (ah, the 90’s. Money!) and after I had signed a waiver, they pressed too hard on that quadrant of my back and I felt something go…but as I said no investigation…
2009. When my gall bladder emergency surgery was done, the surgeon described it as “infected and crushed.” So, backtracking it makes sense. I still have pain, so I figure more may have been damaged, by these original injuries so I’ll find out in the next ten years what got damaged. Having an imperfect gall bladder or none at all) is often the cause of really ramped up gut problems.
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1996 “You may have low thyroid, but not enough to medicate.” 2008 “You have low thyroid and it could have been responsible for up to one-third of your weight gains.” Damn. Just Damn.
Now on cheap medicine for that.
Again, not for sympathy points, but just for documentation.
The list of impairments now stands at.
Born with ataxic cerebral palsy.
Existing gut trouble aggravated by bile. (The bile problem may be gradually lessening due to a specific med for that part.)
Carpal Tunnel
Asthma
Tendon deformity, arrival 2008
Depression/anxiety
Adult (and probably childhood) ADD.
And, I am very angry that I lived with some of these not knowing they were happening.
Some of the new stuff wasn’t known about till the 1990’s or so like the ADD and I get that.
But these others?
Feh.
I’m confused….
So, when I was working with vocational rehab a few years ago, they tested my intelligence first, and I believe that since the intelligence part was high…they decided nothing else or nothing new could be happening. Only my depression. that existed already at the time as a possible factor in my jobllessness at the time.
Because you know, a smart person with a high IQ couldn’t possibly have mental health issues.
My new shrink did the screenings for two new conditions *first* before trying to put a handle on my IQ….and I have one new and possibly two new diagnoses.
There was this one list, and I kept saying “Wait, this happens to other people?”
This not knowing where a thing is a minute after I put it down, the rampant disorganization and procrastination that is my life…and the more recent (1993) sudden onslaught of negative emotion connected to a memory or piece of music when I didn’t ask for it….
There are apparently reasons listed in the DSM4 for this.
Hmmm
I’m glad there are others who can do
this, publicly rage against those abled who, sometimes get almost inarticulate with anger when they find they must accomodate us.
Obviously this place isn’t low on snarkage. But, my rage is *sometimes* tied directly to my bipolar, and I find that if I let it loose, it can lead to days (weeks) of my emotions running me, instead of me being in charge.
So this late in life, I have to learn to “hold back.’ Not because any particular inhabitant of the able world doesn’t richly deserve having their mental skin flayed off by a verbal cut or 100, but that in my case, there isn’t enough control on my side to guarantee that that barrage might not result in bad emotional balance for me.
Thank god for other blasters. Go get ’em.
Midlife And Treachery 
