Federal Disability Retirement Lawyer: The Wear of Medical Conditions

Some words have constrained, limiting and restricted meanings, available only in esoteric whispers of academic thunderings; others, of common and every day usage, but through monotony of repetition and sheer ordinariness, loses any luster of royal patronage; and yet others, because of the expansive and varied contextual applications, can be applicable afresh, when needs require service of exposure.

One can “wear” clothing; “wear” glasses or a smile; or pass the time tediously, as in, “The minutes wore onward with a tired sense of sadness”.  The word applies also when a person or object begins to diminish, to fatigue, or to slowly fade.  Medical conditions tend to do that, like worn furniture in a house dilapidated by time, where the tiredness of untempered souls and toils of life’s encounters begin to tear at the timeless tokens of tapestries, and one begins to give in to fatefulness.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who wear the face of normalcy, but who must contend not only with an underlying medical condition, as well as the hostility of a workplace and a world which grants no empathy, filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is often seen as a surrender of sorts, a wearing of the proverbial white flag, and an admission and acknowledgment that time has worn the welcome of a bright future.

The wear of medical conditions indeed warrants a respite from the world of turmoil, and a more positive outlook is to simply grant the world its due, and instead to realize that filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits is merely to access an employment benefit which is merely part of the larger employment compensation package signed on to at the beginning of one’s Federal or Postal career, and in accessing the benefit, as nothing more than to assert what is available.

To contend with the wear of a medical condition is a weary challenge; to wear one’s welcome is to withstand unnecessarily.  Wisdom is to recognize one’s time and to wear the wisdom of time when welcomes wither.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

OPM Medical Retirement: The Paradigm of Disarray

One can go through life with the belief that the wider geopolitical universe as reflected through countless media outlets represents the true state of everyday existence; as wars, earthquakes, floods and famine destroy families, communities and conduits of chaos, so such a paradigm of disarray can color the subjective perspective which we carry about in the monotony of routine existence.

The extreme rejection of such a model viewpoint is to be a hermit; or, the balanced approach is to “keep things in perspective”, as the general advice goes, but what does it exactly mean to keep something in proper perspective?

On the one hand, if you carry forth the aggregate of transatlantic turmoil as representing what occurs or can potentially occur in the parameters of one’s locality, then that would certainly provide an imbalanced perspective.  On the other hand, ignoring and rejecting all events and occurrences outside of the artificial confines of one’s back yard would negate the reality of the intersection between information, knowledge and wisdom; for, as ignorance constitutes bliss, so deliberately ignoring events outside of one’s living room may represent the pinnacle of ecstatic living.  Then, when one throws a medical condition into the mix, the attempt to maintain a balance of perspective becomes exponentially difficult to maintain.

Medical conditions have a tendency to exacerbate the paradigm of disarray.  For Federal and Postal employees 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, the necessity to maintain a proper perspective and balance of one’s life, accomplishments and future potential can become so skewed as to face fears of cognitive mountains insurmountable.  It is hard enough to maintain a balanced perspective in this world where media rules and interjects every aspect of life; where computers feed messages and track buying habits in order to invade your conscious existence; and where the 24-hour news feed is the norm.

Whether from chronic pain which tips the capacity to process information overload adequately, or psychiatric conditions which by their very nature create an imbalance of certitude; the Federal or Postal employee who suffers from a medical condition will feel that the world once balanced within a universe of rationality, is now turned topsy-turvy through an inverted prism.

Federal Disability Retirement benefits, filed through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is a benefit offered to all Federal and Postal employees who seek to escape from an exacerbated imbalance of perspective resulting from an on (or off) duty injury, physical illness or a mental condition which impacts the ability to perform the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal position.  It is an avenue to make upright that which produced the paradigm of disarray through the intersecting forces of physical or mental debilitation — that medical condition which one never asked for; which one barely supposed; and of which the greater geopolitical world is unaware.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire