OPM Medical Retirement Law: Incomplete Knowledge

Like a house abandoned in mid-construction, you can often tell about a person who suffers from such a “malady” — the metaphor of the unframed windows; perhaps the roof shingles had not yet been laid, leaving only the plywood boards which would slowly rot away; and while the concrete foundation may have been set, the siding or brick had not yet been placed, leaving the frame of the house standing, yet incomplete.

There are descriptive terms often used: “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing”; or, just of the autodidact who has little bits of knowledge here and there, but cannot quite put his arms completely around the subject at hand.  Incomplete knowledge is what we all experience, because the complexities of a subject have become too technical, too all-encompassing, such that we can barely complete our education on any single sub-section of a discipline.

Federal Disability Retirement Law is similarly poised — for, the compendium of case-laws handed down through judicial opinions, whether from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board or from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, has modified the originating statutes and regulations governing Federal Disability Retirement Law.

It is bad enough that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management itself fails to apply the law — often because of incomplete knowledge — but it happens enough times to the disadvantage of the Federal or Postal employee, such that a more complete knowledge of the law is necessary to rebut an unfairly-rendered decision.

Contact an OPM Disability Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, and make sure that you are not denied your eligibility rights because of incomplete knowledge.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill,
Lawyer exclusively representing Federal and Postal employees to secure their Federal Disability Retirement benefits under FERS from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

 

FERS Medical Disability Benefits: King for a Day

There are times when you simply “feel” different; of having greater confidence; of sensing that you can accomplish things in life beyond the negative reality that circumstances have imposed; and that had you been born in the days of feudal lords and castle moats surrounding the dungeons of the human heart, you would have been knighted on this day of days where reckonings don’t matter and the callous universe around fails to dent the optimism abounding.

Is it all a surreal mirage?  Is being King for a Day enough for most of us, when reality checks the fantasies and daydreams with impervious ineptitude but with an efficiency far beyond what most of us require?

Contrast such a day to so many others: the daily grind of mortality’s unforgiving nature, where we feel less than the day’s wages will allow for. Medical conditions have a pernicious way of beating us down; and on those days when we feel that we are the King for a Day, it turns out that it was all a figment, a filament of unproven discourse echoing down chambers that we never knew.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition makes for continuation in one’s Federal or Postal job an incompatibility which cannot be sustained, filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is an option to consider.  Chronic medical conditions sometimes allow for a moment’s respite, where you might feel that you are “King for a Day”; but that is not enough to sustain or justify the unendurable.

OPM Disability Retirement is a benefit which all Federal and Postal employees have a right to, so long as the medical condition impacts one’s ability and capacity to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, and it can be shown to last for a minimum of 12 months.

Consult with a lawyer who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law, lest being King for Day is not enough to sustain the remainder of the days when you merely feel like the pawn isolated and abandoned within the Court of Human Misery.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

FERS Disability Retirement Benefits: Fooling ourselves

It takes extraordinary intelligence to play the fool, and an even greater cleverness to fool oneself; just read a few lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the interaction between Lear and the Fool, and one realizes the extensive capacity of self-indulgence in the deception of man in his need to guard his own ego.

In fooling one’s self, does one fool others, as well?  If a person takes on a persona, lives in a fantasy world, creates an identity separate and apart, and yet becomes consumed by the double-life to the extent that he or she comes to believe one’s own creative imagination, does the fact that others who knew the person from childhood onward destroy the fool’s own universe of make-believe?

Of the old adage and Biblical admonition that prophets are never accepted in their own hometown — is this because those who know a person from early life, “know better”?

If we fool ourselves only within the contained universe of our own thoughts, and never let the fantasies “seep out” into the objective reality of other’s awareness, have we fooled ourselves?  Others?  Is living a “double-life” the same as fooling ourselves and others, or is it only when we fool those closest to us where the “double” makes a difference?

What about hiding a medical condition?  What if a person is on anti-depressants or other psychotropic medication regimens, and yet everyone else believes that person to be the envy of the world, of the very definition of “happiness” exponentially quantified, until one day that very person is committed to an intensive psychiatric hospital and it comes out that he or she is the most unhappiest of individuals — has that person fooled himself, others, or both?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job, a great deal of “fooling” must go on in the interim.  You may overcompensate; you may appear to others to be “just fine”; and the tailored seams of normalcy may continue on for some time, until the wear and tear of self-deception begins to take its toll.

Preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often the first honest step towards being “true to one’s self”, and like the fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear, it is the capacity of the King fooling himself, and not the honesty of the fool, that makes for the tragedy that ensues.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Lawyer Representation OPM Disability Retirement: The winter doldrums

Whether everyone without exception experiences it, one can never tell.  For some, it comes in a subtle, slow manner, approaching at the beginning of, somewhere in the middle, or near the end when the long days of cold and darkness seem to have pervaded for too long that it has extinguished any memories of summer days and the sound of lapping waves in the heat of August.

For others, it comes like the roaring rush of the Siberian winds, paralyzing one as the shivers and overwhelming sense of doom and gloom – those twin cousins of an anticipated darkness and a subjective response to such environmental causation – becomes unavoidable in their power and sensation.  Of course, those who live in Florida never experience it, or rarely so.

The winter doldrums come upon most, in varying states of power, with impact in spectrums that only the affected individual can concede to.  It is, of course, too early to complain about so nascent in the season.  Instead, we are to be “joyful”, as the holiday season is upon us; and yet…

The analogy and metaphor have been applied in literature great and mediocre; of seasons likened to life’s cycles, and of their parallels to the experiences engaged.  From the “winter of discontent” to the “summer of childhood memories”, the cycle of seasons play upon the imagination, as spring represents the innocent beginnings of youthful dreams and fall betrays the end of childhood.

But of winter?  Where does the metaphor begin, and more importantly, what is anticipated beyond the frozen pillars of shivering nights?  And of winter doldrums – do we all experience them, and to what metaphor will we attribute the sensation of blanketed despondency, never to be shed except in the light of hope for a future yet to be anticipated?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition has brought about the winter doldrums too early in one’s career, preparing a Federal Disability Retirement application, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, may well be the only way to shed the blanket of winter doldrums.  For, if spring is the season of hope and summer the embracing of tomorrow, then fall must by necessity be the phase of the downtrodden, and the winter doldrums the time to begin preparing.

Such analogies, of course, are meant to be just that – images by which to begin a process that remains a stark reality – for, the bureaucracy of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is likened to a dark dungeon that must be faced, and the perilous journey of filing a Federal Disability Retirement is sometimes the only way out of the despair of the Winter doldrums, by preparing, formulating and filing an effective OPM Disability Retirement application.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement: Life’s perverse fullness

As children, many are taught that life’s promise is unlimited in potentiality, full in its discourse of uncharted waters, and expansive in its promise for tomorrow.  Somewhere, in middle-to-late years, we begin to have a somewhat more “balanced” view: not of fullness merely painted with hope and promise, but with graffiti unasked for, undesired and unwanted: the perverse side of fullness.

Life can indeed contain and present a “full plate” (as metaphors go), but the question then becomes: What is on that plate?  When a potluck dinner is coordinated, there is an interesting phenomenon that occurs, where judgments are fairly quickly made by the systematic depletion of certain foods, and the untouched portions carefully avoided.  Anonymity is crucial to the success of the endeavor itself, but defensiveness is easily assuaged by the general rules of etiquette when asked and confronted: “Oh, I plan on getting seconds” or, “My plate is too small to get everything the first round!”

Excepting social pressures and avoiding hurt feelings, we all tend to gravitate towards that which we desire; yet, we also put on our plates the food items that “balance” the diet – with knowledge and admonitions that certain foods are “healthy” for us, while avoiding those that we have specific allergic reactions to, or otherwise leave us with uncomfortable residual gastronomic pains.

Every now and again, of course, we take on too much – or, as the saying goes and the wisdom that we impart to our children, “My eyes are too big for my stomach”.  It is then that we surreptitiously look for the hidden garbage bin, and infelicitously dump the “leftovers” beneath the mountain of other paper plates, and quickly scurry away from the scene of the crime committed.  Yet, why we fret over an infraction of taking on too much, is often a mystery; is it because waste balanced by greedy overreach combines to reveal a character flaw?  Or is it much simpler than that – that we are often too hard on ourselves?  Taking on “too much” is not a crime; it is simply an anomaly in the general dictum of life’s perverse fullness.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal Service workers who are at a critical juncture where filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits – whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset – becomes a necessity, it is often the case that one’s “life-plate” has become overburdened: work, career, personal obligations, medical conditions, effects of surgery, etc. – the balance can no loner be maintained.  Something has to “give”, and whatever that “something” is, it usually ends up further impacting one’s health.

Filing for OPM Disability Retirement benefits should not be forever stuck on the “pause” button; the longer it stays in a rut, the greater opportunity for deterioration and detriment to one’s health.  We often wait until it is almost “too late”; but just remember that, where life’s perverse fullness includes one’s deteriorating health, it is never a good thing to leave that which is most important, untouched – one’s health.  And, as Federal Disability Retirement is a means to allowing for one’s health to improve so that, perhaps, one day, a second career, vocation, or further productivity can be achieved, so preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often the portion of the potluck meal that requires first attention.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire