FERS Medical Retirement from OPM: Fiction and Falsity

Are the two the same?  Or, is it the awareness which bifurcates the two into a conscious difference?

Fiction is one thing, falsity, quite another.  When fiction is put forth as fact, then it is falsity by another name; but falsity is what it is from the very beginning; it does not transform like Kafka’s Metamorphosis because the intent behind the falsity was to deceive, to begin with.  Movies; novels; television shows — they all give us the fiction of entertainment; but how we embrace them and live our lives within the fiction of our own lives, blurs the distinction between Fiction and Falsity.

It is, perhaps, an insidious, incremental falsity which begins to invade our daily lives.  We watch such action films — of the Bourne Sagas, or the 007 series & Mission Impossible movies, and we begin to perceive the world as somehow inclusively integrating such fiction; perhaps in distant beliefs that our government reflects some partial psychosis of such representations.  And when we read or hear of governmental misdeeds, we harken back and say to ourselves: See?

What happened in those fictional movies actually happens, even though falsity would — or should — protect us from such absurdities.  But read a short story like Ferdinand von Shirach’s tale entitled, “Self-Defense”.  It is fiction, but clearly based upon his experience as a top Criminal Defense Lawyer in Berlin.  Is it “fiction”?  Yes, at least officially.  Is it Falsity?  Just as clearly — not.

It is beyond fiction or falsity, because it is real and true.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, where the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from continuing in your Federal or Postal job, it is always important to distinguish between Fiction, Falsity and the reality of your situation.

As the U.S. Office of Personnel Management is clearly an agency which is ready to pounce upon any indicia of fictional falsity, you may want to contact a FERS Disability Attorney who specializes in FERS Disability Retirement Law, to make sure that your representation of reality doesn’t cross the line into Fiction or Falsity.

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.

 

Medical Retirement Benefits for Federal & Postal Workers: Expectations versus Reality

The dawn of the American century arrived sometime after the First World War.  America’s entrance into the world stage; its dominance in influencing culture, economics, politics and social upheavals cannot be ignored.  At home, too, kids were brought up with a view that expectations were limitless; that everyone could achieve anything and everything so long as you put your heart, mind and soul into it.

The reality, of course, is quite different.  For, the fantasy of expectations fails to take into account individual limitations, whether in the arena of creativity, intelligence, circumstances or just plain luck.

We taught our kids the false pablum that in America, everything is possible for everyone, and thus do we have the reality-check upon millennials and others that, NO, not everything is possible, and sometimes you have to accept the plain fact that reality imposes a check upon your expectations: You cannot win at everything; you cannot succeed at every crazy venture; you are not always going to come in first; and, in fact, you may not even be given a pat on the back just because you show up.

Medical conditions, likewise, provide a reality check.  We are not all of us triathletes; our bodies are, indeed, vulnerable; and though we may think we are a species which can multitask better than other specialized animals (i.e., the predator cats are good at chasing and killing; the falcon at zeroing in upon its prey, etc. — but the human animal, though not the best at any one thing, is good enough at a multitude of different tasks), there is a limit as to how much we can do before the stress and anxiety of becoming overwhelmed sets in.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition has given you the reality check against expectations of continued employment with your Federal Agency or the Postal Service, contact an attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law and begin the process of initiating the preparation, formulation and filing of an effective Federal Disability Retirement application — where you are finally recognizing that there is a substantive distinction to be made between expectations and reality.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Lawyer
OPM Medical Disability Retirement Attorney

Federal Disability Retirement: The memory of greener pastures

Are memories faulty, and are they so for a purpose?  Does the human psyche selectively extrapolate the positive and repress the negative precisely in order to preserve an optimism that will incentivize survival?  If our memory banks retain a pessimism such that the overload of negative images cumulatively dominates, wouldn’t the subtle forces of depression set in to overwhelm us?

The memory of greener pastures — are they true in an objective sense, or only in the selective and myopic perspective that has filtered the negation of subjective desires?  Was childhood as innocent as we remember?  Were the ice cream cones on a hot summer’s day better then, and the wintry winds of Christmas Eve so filled with anticipation of glee that yesterday’s joy was tenfold the truth of untold lies?

We do tend to remember the summers of yesteryear, and of thinking that the lights across the street glow a warmth of love and fidelity; and yet, we know that the room within which we stand is likely a reflection of a reality no lesser, nor no greater, than the greener pastures across the way.  Except when a medical condition hits us.  Then, the memory of greener pastures always reflect the “before” — before the condition worsened; before it began to impact my work; before it became a chronic condition.

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, it is often the memory of greener pastures that finally prompts the Federal or Postal employee into preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management under FERS.

For, the greener pastures that once were can still be those of tomorrow, but only if the focus of one’s life can attend first to the medical condition itself, without the greater burden of work and the harassment and constant hostility of the Federal Agency or the U.S. Postal Service.

To preserve and hold sacred the memory of greener pastures is to prioritize the things that we hold dear and important, and one’s health should be at the top of the list of such priorities.  Protect it by preparing, formulating and filing an effective FERS Disability Retirement application, to be filed through OPM so that those memories of greener pastures in yesteryear’s childhood joys will not be subsumed by the worries of one’s deteriorating future.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Disability Information: The shaken confidence

Tree limbs can be shaken; hands can shake, evidencing some agreement or initial salutation of a wordless sort, or even accompanied by some utterances; and the earth can shake as the subterranean tectonic shifts invisible and otherwise unnoticed, which then can result in tsunamis and other natural disasters.

The shaken confidence can take many forms; and the forms themselves cannot so easily be identified.  It presumes, first of all, that there was “confidence” to begin with, lest that which is shaken could not possibly have occurred unless it preexisted the loss of it.  Yet, too often, the evidence of its very existence is merely the lack of any contrary characteristic — i.e., a negation that fails to manifest existence and thus cannot actually be proven.  Of a person who walks about without any noticeable trace of lack — do we say of him or her, “He has confidence’?  Or is it just the one who has an overabundance of it, who struts around like a proud peacock or a rooster who takes no guff of whom we attribute “overconfidence’?

In normal discourse we just assume that, unless there are indications to the contrary, everyone who stands and walks amidst and among us possess some level of “confidence” or, in more particularized form, of “self-confidence”.  What are the events or issues that “shake” it, and what can an attribution of such an event mean?  Perhaps it is triggered by some tragic source — a trauma of a very personal nature, of death or an accident, perhaps; or can it be by mere utterance of words, of a berating boss or an insensitive spouse?  Or, how about a realization that one’s presumed immortality is simply not so?

None of us believe in immortality — at least, not in the sense that we will live forever walking about this earth.  Yet, until an event “reminds” us of our mortality, we take it for granted that life goes on as the day before, and the day before that; and so the concept of immortality resides by avoidance or ignorance, until something “reminds” us that, indeed, mortality is the nature of life, and flesh is by each instance and in incremental subtlety progressively deteriorating within the microscopic cells of slow degeneration.  And of a medical condition — can it be the source of the shaken confidence?

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 — the shaken confidence resulting from the progressively deteriorating medical condition is just as real as the earth that trembles and groans from tectonic shifts that moves and crumbles the structural integrity of high engineering feats.

Federal Disability Retirement is often not a choice made in confidence, but from a lack thereof; for, a medical condition cannot be viewed within a vacuum of a mere diagnosis that can be surgically extracted; rather, a medical condition is a sequence of aggregated tragedies — of the medical condition itself; the symptoms which result; the impact upon one’s personal and professional life; of the effect upon family and friends; of the triggers upon one’s psyche as well as the physical pain and mental anguish experienced.

In short, the shaken confidence of the one who used to walk about the earth as if you owned it, and preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is simply the first step in regaining that “shaken confidence” that was once a day before in a time now long forgotten presumed to have always been there.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Medical Retirement under FERS & CSRS: Weekend Survival

The segmentation of time may be artificial; the rhythms of life, are not.  The 7-day week, 30-day month (give or take a couple here and there) and the 12-month cycle constitute human constructs that impose a rigid system of divisions based upon productivity, leisure, an admixture of both (isn’t it universal that Saturdays are spent in doing chores otherwise unattended to during the week, and Sunday is that respite and escape in total destitution of depleted dreariness?) and then a reset button pushed and the beginning of the cycle all over again.

Yet, while the system itself is based upon a conceptually artificial construct, the rhythmic underpinning of nature that glides above and beneath on a daily, quiet but consistent basis remains unperturbed.

That is why Daylight Savings Time makes grouches of us all — it is another artificial construct that jolts everyone from the natural rhythms of monotonous apathy twice a year, and breaks up that flow of biodynamic symbiosis between the planetary rotations, the daily sunrise and sunset, and the body’s reaction to a natural order within the constructs of an unnatural way of living.  The only compensation we feel grateful for is that extra hour of sleep that we are “given” in the Fall — only to have it stripped mercilessly and robbed from us in the Spring.

Thank God for the weekend — those two days of respite and leisure; of restorative rest and a quietude away from the mad dash of work and productivity; and we believe that we owe to the gods our lives and sacrifice our health for those pittance of days that are given to us.  But what are those 2 days worth?

Half of one is given up to do those things that we had no time to do during the five days of labor; the other half, spent in frozen immobility in front of a screen that blasts frightful images both from news of the “real” world as well as stories that are supposedly “entertaining”.  Then, with the one day remaining, we try and compensate for the exhaustion from the previous 5+1, only to wake up the following morning to engage the rush of the work-week that suffers and harms.

For Federal employees and Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition becomes a trial of survival during the week in order to make it to the weekend just to survive, it is worse because — not only is the “natural” rhythm interrupted by the medical condition itself — days, weeks and months all meld and melt into a singular whole of survival and consternation of life’s trials.

Preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, may be the only option remaining in order to re-order the rhythm lost in the daily struggle to reach that weekend survival where the cycle of life’s natural rhythm has been shattered by the trauma of a chronic medical condition.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Medical Retirement for Federal & Postal Employees: Usurping dreams

What happened to them?  Where did those once youthful and exuberant conduits taking us beyond the monotony of the present disappear to?  When did we allow for “practicality” and “being real”, of “growing up” and “becoming responsible” to usurp the dreams of our youth?  Did we misjudge, misunderstand and misapply the principles first taught, and confuse the two concepts – of having a “realistic viewpoint” and abandoning all dreams and hopeful fantasies?

The two are not mutually exclusive; one can still work upon one’s dreams, yet go about the work-a-day world to make a living and pursue a career.  Ah, but then, life intervenes and interrupts, doesn’t it?  Is that why children are delayed, trips are cancelled and i-phones are kept in sacrosanct altars beneath the altered photographs of our imagined pasts?  Is the procrastination invited, the delayed life intruded upon and the project-time of 5-year plans extended, precisely because if we keep pushing beyond and giving ourselves excuses for inaction, there will one day come a time when we will admit that it is too late?

Usurping dreams is the insidious encroachment of cynicism shadowing our once promising beginnings, and the pendulum that allows for the heavy turn when clocks no longer run, thoughts become stale and creativity is suddenly disposed of, then the stench of human decay begins to set in, and we slowly die a death we once mourned in the youthful hope of our former times.

Usurping dreams is like the virus that gnaws away at the flesh of joy; usurping dreams is like the broken cane that once held the weight of an old man’s hand and allowed for ambulation, and no matter how many time you tape it together or glue the fissure, the weakest point of the break never quite heals; and usurping dreams is like the Book of Plans once gathered, then put aside into the cellar of one’s forgotten memories, only to remain in haunting whispers, always calling, never being heard but in the darkness where fears are touched and enlivened by the sunlight never quite seen for want of bringing back those youthful memories of exuberant smiles and unselfish shouts of pure happiness.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to prevent the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of the Federal or Postal job, the question is:  Did the career do it; did the medical condition do it; or is there still hope beyond the medical condition and the career?

Preparing a Federal Disability Retirement application, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, has now become a necessity.  The only real question remaining is whether the same pause which allowed for usurping of dreams those many years ago is the identical weakness of groundless fears that prevents you from taking that next step into a still-hopeful future.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

OPM Disability Retirement: Fishes, Streams, Rivers and Ponds

They are, in the end, interconnected; yet the conceptual distinctions allow for separateness, such that we can value each independently.  And much of the waterways which filter throughout the ecosystem remain invisible and underground, via caverns and unconfined aquifers; but that which we see with the naked eye, we assume to be the reality of the entirety of that which we hold to encompass the universe of our existence.

Thus does Berkeley’s doctrine simply contained in the phrase, “Esse est percipi” retain a kernel of truth, but forever vulnerable to ridicule if misunderstood in the context of linguistic philosophy.  What is perceived is, indeed, the universe of one’s contextual concerns; but we all recognize that objects exist outside of the perceptual periphery of our immediate perspective.

Thus do fishes, streams, rivers and ponds exist beyond our vision of direct perception; but even upon encountering them,  we recognize that the depth of each, the variety of living organisms, and the corridors of natural flowing underground worlds reach well beyond that which we see.  The complexity of human beings comprise an entity of a similar nature, such that depth, encounters and unknowable reaches could easily be conversed and replaced as fungible goods and translated words.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to become a problem at work, it is precisely this puzzle of being replaceable which often irks the ego.  Filing for Federal disability benefits from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often viewed as giving up or giving in; when, in fact, the truth of the matter is that it is a means of attending to the importance of one’s health and well-being.  But others in the agency and the U.S. Postal Service often view the potential Federal Disability Retiree as “that person” with a label and a superficial concoction of societal designation.

It is that limited encounter and confrontation which shows the lack of depth of certain people, while everyone wants others to know that, past the fishes, streams, rivers and ponds which one may see upon meeting the Federal or Postal employee suffering from a medical condition, such that the health condition prevents one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, there is extenuating further, a vast depth of subterranean interest and an ocean of personality which others never cared to inquire about, and of which no one may ever know once the door closes and the quietude of life continues beyond.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement Lawyer: The Balance of Body

Have you ever noticed that, if you attempt to compensate with one extremity over another, whether because of pain or temporary incapacitation in an attempt to alleviate and relieve the lesser limb, that the one in use becomes slowly debilitated as well?  The body is a balanced mechanism; it is designed to work in coordinated fashion, as a unit of entirety.  It may well be that if one component of that working aggregate requires temporary suspension, that another unit may, for a time, serve as the greater replacement by working “overtime”; but in the end, all workers are expected to return to full labor, lest the entire operation itself shuts down.

That is why pain and similar symptoms serve as a warning system for a greater condition.  People often think that compensating for a medical condition can be derived through persevering and ignoring; instead, what happens is that the other parts of the body begin to shut down and deteriorate.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to prevent the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties in the Federal Sector, the attempt to overcompensate often leads to greater exacerbation, both in terms of the medical condition itself, as well as for the agency through bringing greater attention to one’s self.

It may be that a Federal or Postal worker may, for a time, get away with persevering and neglect of the warning systems; but in the end, the intricate and delicate balance of body, like the greater ecosystem of nature, will begin to reveal signs of wear and decay, and the time lost in taking the necessary steps will merely be unrecoverable segments of lapsed periods, where commas and pauses needed to be overcome in the preparation, formulation and filing of a Federal Disability Retirement with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Medical Retirement: Always the Fundamentals

Whether or at what stage of the process the Federal employee or the U.S. Postal worker finds him/herself in, it is always essential to harken back to the fundamentals of the legal criteria to meet.

One can become sidetracked by the complexity of the process; and, indeed, the bureaucratic, procedural hoops which one must always keep in mind while maneuvering through the process, tend to obfuscate and confuse.  Bureaucracies thrive upon complexities, just as most professions do; the greater the complexity, the higher need for continuation of the employment of experts to propagate the systemically confounding process.

In engaging the process itself, the Federal and Postal employee must distinguish between procedural issues and substantive cores; the administrative steps of the “what” to do, in contrast to the substantive evidence to be submitted.  Both are equally important; for, without the former, it may never reach the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and without the latter, even if it reaches the destination point, it may fail to meet the preponderance of the evidence test and attain a level of evidentiary sufficiency to make a difference.

Whether at the Initial Stage of the process, the Reconsideration Stage, or even an appeal to the U.S.Merit Systems Protection Board, it is always essential to keep in mind that the fundamentals of the case must always be kept at the fore.

Remember:  This is a “medical” disability retirement; the conduct of others, the meanness of coworkers, the harassment encountered, and the ill-treatment received over the years; while hurtful, and perhaps the catalyst for resentment, they are not the paths to follow in preparing, formulating and filing for Federal Employee Disability Retirement benefits, whether the Federal employee or the U.S. Postal worker is under FERS, CSRS, or CSRS Offset.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire