OPM Disability Benefits: Fatigue of Life

There is clearly a distinction to be made between the general fatigue which life blows upon us all; like the child left to play outside in days of yore, and comes back with the grime of healthy dirtiness, the imperceptible layers of life’s hardships cover everyone, like the light dusting of snow overnight revealed in the morning dawn of a winter’s day.  But the profound fatigue which overtakes one from the daily battle against an incapacitating medical condition, is a difference which cannot always be adequately described, if ever.

The medical condition itself creates a circumstance of unique debilitation; the fight against it, whether without one’s conscious involvement — as in the soundless battle of healthy cells against the invasion of marauding maladies, as opposed to the exertion of willpower to continue on in engaging the daily living of life’s challenges — is of somewhat irrelevance, inasmuch as the combination and totality of one’s entire being is always and every day in the midst of the fight.

It is that subtle distinction which the healthy person is unable to understand; it is not life’s fatigue which prevails upon the sick person; it is the sickness itself, in addition to the fatigue of life.

For Federal and Postal workers who must contend not only with the daily grind of life’s routine, facing the bureaucracy and administrative headaches of filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through one’s agency (if still with the agency or otherwise not separated for more than 31 days), and ultimately through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is a challenge beyond that foray of the day’s entanglement with the world.

Federal and Postal employees must do the everyday things that all of us do:  attention to personal needs; work, if possible; interaction with family, neighbors, coworkers; and beyond, the fight against the medical condition itself.

Filing for Medical Retirement through OPM, whether the Federal or Postal worker is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is to face another of life’s challenges, beyond the daily routine and call of one’s duty and commitment to everyday life.  And since defeat is never an option, and giving up is not in the American character of perceived self-image; whether one is faced with the fatigue of life, or of life’s challenges beyond the general malaise of daily living, it is how we face the cup of gruel we are served, which will determine the future path as yet unknown, as yet unsettled.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Twilight’s Landing

Sleep is often the category of escape; restorative sleep, a palliative prescription for a medical condition.  Upon closing one’s eyelids, the images which pervade from the day’s stimuli slowly recede as the dark chasm of one’s own consciousness begins to fade, and sleep begins to overtake, leading us into that shadow of twilight’s landing.

It is when chronic pain, discomfort, and the gnawing neurons which fail to relax but continue to send signals of dismay and distress, that the world of wakefulness and the dawn of sleep fail to switch off; or the continuing anxiety, depression or panic attacks control and jolt one into the awareness of darkness.  Medical conditions have an impact not only upon the daytime soul, but in the sleeplessness of non-sleep as well.

For Federal and Postal workers who are formulating a Federal Disability Retirement application and preparing one’s Statement of Disability on SF 3112A, one aspect of the descriptive narrative which is often overlooked, both by the doctor as well as the Federal or Postal applicant, is the role that profound fatigue plays upon performing the essential elements of one’s job.  While often implicitly stated or otherwise inferentially contained, explicit extrapolation is important in order to convey all of the elements of one’s medical condition and their impact upon the Federal or Postal employee’s inability to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties.

Perhaps one was reprimanded or suspended for “sleeping on the job”.  Was it mere laziness, or was the underlying medical condition the intermediate cause of an act or event otherwise seen as an insubordinate statement of defiance?  Reasons and rationales provided make all the difference in this very human universe of language games and counter-games.  For, in order to effectively submit a Federal Disability Retirement application through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal employee or the U.S. Postal Worker is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the important thing is to make sure and sufficiently describe and delineate the primary and secondary causes of one’s underlying medical conditions. This includes the inability to have restorative sleep, the profound and intractable fatigue one experiences, impacting upon one’s daily cognitive functions, etc.

Otherwise, the medical conditions are not adequately conveyed, and when one goes back to sleep in attempting to reach that twilight’s landing, the difficulties of the world will be magnified by another potential problem — a denial from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, of one’s Federal Disability Retirement application.

Sincerely, Robert R. McGill, Esquire

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: The Sound of Tired

Sounds have a distinctive revelatory characteristic; but because ours is primarily a visually-centered society, the other senses are less relied upon, and therefore only secondarily validated in our everyday considerations.

One can see the limping woman; “pain” can be observed by the facial expression of the man; a doctor can validate the correspondence between MRI results and radiating pain sensations, as well as spasms resulting from bending and flexion tests.  But the sound of tired is a more subtle indicator. It defies a quick correspondence between visual ascertainment and objective determination. Instead, it is the profound weight of a man or woman defeated, or on the road to defeat, from conditions beyond one’s control, shrouded between the pitches and reverberations of subcutaneous sound waves touching upon that “other” sense.

Medical conditions have a way of doing that; of slowly, steadily, and in subtle semblance of noiseless shrieks, crumbling away at the walls of resistance.  For Federal and Postal employees who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to prevent one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, whether one is under FERS or CSRS (and the latter — CSRS — is becoming more and more that rare animal, almost to the point of extinction in the wide and expansive preserve of the Federal retirement system), should always be a consideration when the sound of tired begins to rumble in low groans of daily toil.

It is not just exhaustion; it is a profound sense of fatigue upon the body and soul, where the physical, mental and emotional turmoil of fighting against a tripartite battle involving one’s medical condition, concerns for the future, and against one’s very own agency, comes to a flashpoint where one considers surrender as an option of preference. It is thus important to keep one’s ear sensitive and attuned to the sound of tired, and consider that Federal OPM Disability Retirement is an option to discover that plateau of rehabilitative peace.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Restorative Measures

Sleep obviously has an evolutionary purpose.  Anxiety, stress, negative thoughts and perspectives; aggressive behavior, combativeness (otherwise known to spouses as “being grumpy”); inability to maintain one’s focus, concentration, attention to detail; all of these, and much more, can often be ameliorated by a good night’s sleep.

Stress is the overarching component which becomes exacerbated by lack of sleep; it feeds upon all other aspects of the human body, by impacting physical endurance and stamina, by increasing one’s cognitive dysfunctions and capacity to process the quantitative and qualitative amassing of information; and it is thus the vicious cycle of lack-of-sleep leading to greater-stress resulting in increased inability to attain a state-of-restorative sleep. Throughout, stress can be the invisible thread which ties the binds of cyclical ruination and self-destruction.

For Federal and Postal employees who find that a medical condition has impacted one’s ability to maintain a continuity of restorative sleep, consideration in filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, filed through one’s agency if one is still employed or not separated for more than thirty one (31) days, or filed directly to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management if separation has already occurred but one still falls within the 1-year timeframe of the Statute of Limitations, must always be an option.  Federal Disability Retirement allows for one to reach that plateau of self-restorative venues, by having the time and proper perspective to seek out effective medical treatment, not otherwise distracted by the countless demands of one’s Federal or Postal job.

Stress is the silent robber who stealthily destroys one’s health by a thousand cuts; lack of restorative sleep is the subtle, pernicious and progressively deteriorating condition which turns slowly into a crumbling foundation; and failure to act upon correcting the steady onslaught of self-decomposition will only lead one to a state of paralysis, where the shifting plate tectonics will one day reach a crisis point of collision, in the convergence of stress, anxiety, physical collapse, and self-ruination; all because we couldn’t get a good night’s sleep.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire