The Others: Being Disabled and Going Crazy

I tried starting this article over ten times, but I couldn’t find an easy way to transition. For that reason, I’m going to turn off some of my mental filters and be direct here. Bear with me.

For those of you that don’t know me, this is what I look like.

That’s me, in a wheelchair, eating a taco. #thugLife

So imagine my surprise when I received the following letter from the government.

Now either I’m a crazy person, or someone in the government is stupid. Actually, that’s a logical fallacy called a false dichotomy. It’s asinine to assert that only one of these two are true. I guarantee you that I am a crazy person and that this government employee is completely stupid.

Stepping back a bit because context is everything, here’s what happened.

I started this blog, in all honesty, because I’m constantly struggling. Even though I make a pretty great salary as a software engineer, my medical expenses are outrageous. Private insurance doesn’t cover my needs. Let me just say that again because, as I type it out, this is why I think I’m turning into a crazy person. Health insurance doesn’t cover my medical needs. After some navigating through the insurance system, what I discovered was I could have one nurse visit per day, 364 days per year. So, if I could find a way to fling myself out of my wheelchair and into my bed at night, Wile E. Coyote style, I could have someone get me back into my wheelchair in the morning. Well, 364 days out of the 365 days of the year. Because that made sense to someone somewhere at some point. I’m telling you — crazy person.

So my dad found a program that could help. It’s called the Colorado Buy-In program. Conceptually, if you are disabled, what you do is you pay a certain amount to keep Medicaid benefits available so you can work. Sounds great, right? I was over the moon. I could finally have a normal life. Well, as normal as my personality would allow me to be. So how does this program work? I’m so happy you asked.

What you do to see if you’re eligible is you take your monthly income and subtract $65 (just because?). Then you take that amount and divide it by two. Then you take money you get that’s not from a job … and subtract $20. Again, just because. Then you add these and find your spot in a grid of income to find what you would pay. Of course, this grid could have just been setup to show what you owe relative to your income in the first place, but these are just the thoughts crazy people have.

As sort of a caveat, there’s actually a different page with different numbers on the same website that indicate whether or not you qualify. I really can’t explain that.

Anyway, I went to apply. New problem. You can’t actually just apply for the buy in program online. Instead, you have to apply for everything. I discovered I’m not eligible for food stamps for example. I don’t have anything against food stamps. There are a lot of people that truly need it and it makes a lot of sense for them. What doesn’t make sense is making someone that makes an engineer’s salary apply. Of all the problems out there, this isn’t the worst, but I feel like it’s worth bringing up.

Back on topic. I spent several hours applying for a bunch of things I don’t need while being repeatedly rejected (which, if nothing else, is just hurtful), to find out I didn’t qualify because of my income. I did the math over and over again, each time finding I wasn’t even close to the salary limit. I was so baffled, I actually just gave up on it for a few days. Interestingly, I got a phone call from some organization after a few days. As it turns out, the website just defaulted to rejecting me. This independent organization was now actually going to determine my eligibility. I told them I was rejected on the website and they told me not to worry about it.

Crazy person here. Just saying.

We set up an in person interview where she asked me all the questions that I just answered on the website. While it felt completely redundant, I played along. There were some interesting questions added for fun. Was I considering killing myself…or someone else? Am I disabled? Again, this is me and she was sitting right in front of me.

Finally, she explained that, while she hoped it would be faster, the city of Denver was really backed up so it would probably be a very long time before I heard back. Two months later, I got this.

As it turns out, I’m not actually a crazy person. I know this because that was actually part of the question set she had. It also turns out I’m not disabled either apparently. Which just makes having a disabled blog kind of embarrassing.

To sort of sum up, I’m now appealing but, really, who knows how long that’s going to take. I don’t know what to do. I try to play it off like it’s all fun and games, but it’s not. There comes a point when you get so far past your limit, you don’t know how to find your way back. I just … I really don’t know what to do.