Around the eight years ago time-frame, my upper right quadrant including the upper back and right shoulder got into a real bad trajectory. I’m pretty sure things finally went south there for good after trying to catch the rear axle coming out of that ’74 Duster. Can’t really pin any one event on the shoulder issues, but it had been bad for years, rated for disability at retirement from the Air Force.
So after the shoulder finally became more-or-less non-functional and hurting pretty bad, we went through a two-year VA diagnostic process detailing what I summarized in the 1st paragraph above. The C-Spine has been a worsening chronic factor since 2001, so I had some PT for that, and after some more time, x-rays and indecision, Dr. Sylvestri finally ended up rebuilding the right shoulder, somewhere short of a total arthroplasty. IIRC, the final tally was the sub-pectoral, 3 cuff tears and some bone spurs. It’s still pretty painful, but at least I can use it now, so that eventually became an overall great outcome.
During that process I’m thinking this disability thing’s getting more real all the time and applied for a rating increase on the C-Spine, which was summarily dismissed. This must be a big issue for the people with hard-to-see stuff like me. I’m pretty sure unless you show up missing a leg from an IED attack or something similar, they just deny every non-obvious claim by default. So after being around this block once already with the right hip replacement, I determined an appeal was in order. It took awhile, but they finally got it right. I wonder how many years worth of my increased compensation benefit it will take to match the amount spent trying to deny it:
Note that is just the last page of a fifteen page decision letter. The level of byzantine detail they go into is unnerving – no pun intended. I would like to know why they included recent year’s evidence in an six-year-old claim appeal decision, referring to a lumbar injury only a few weeks ago determined to be degenerative disc disease by a VA administrator(?). It’s insane. They were probably going to rate me totally disabled before I had my back broken on the operating table two years ago. Maybe that was just to make sure.
I’d post a snippet from the boilerplate malpractice claim denial I received a few weeks ago, but there’s no point. I wonder if they’d approve that claim for somebody picked up off a battlefield with a torn lumbar?