I've had an unexpected major change in employment. Actually, I'm a little blown away by it.
From 1979 to 2015, I held two simultaneous full time healthcare jobs... one as a paramedic and the other as a registered nurse. I worked about 60 to 80 hours a week and loved every minute of it. Around 2010, I started to notice some pain in my shoulders at night and had trouble reaching for things above the level of my shoulders. I attributed it to overuse after lifting heavy people and stretchers for so many years. Over the next few years, my shoulders worsened and my orthopedist ordered bilateral MRI's. The results showed bursitis and arthritis and he found pathological calcium deposits had permanently developed inside both side's rotator cuff tendons. Finally, in 2015, after experiencing progressive increasing pain and deteriorating range of motion in my shoulders and realizing that it was starting to interfere with the ability to perform my job, I came to the realization that I had to look for less-physically-demanding work and leave the field of healthcare.
Since 2015, I've worked three different jobs in retail, believing each one would be less physically demanding than the last. I worked as a grocery store manager, a customer service manager for Walmart, and, finally, as a lowly, humiliated convenience store clerk. Soon after starting each job, I quickly discovered that my shoulders could not tolerate the required physical demands.
I have three different doctors... two are specialists and one is my primary care provider. Early in 2018, I visited each one for routine, unrelated appointments. Each one independently told me that my shoulders had deteriorated to a point where I should seriously consider applying for Social Security Disability. Reluctantly, I did, with the help of the county's disability office, expecting it to be a bureaucracy-laden waste of time. Over the next few months, I begrudgingly filled out the never-ending supply of forms that arrived in the mail every couple of days and complied with their request to have their doctor examine me.
Seven months later, I received a letter indicating that my initial request for disability had been denied, as expected. The county disability office automatically appealed the decision, which was SOP. Four more months passed. Last Wednesday, I received a call from the regional Social Security office. The man I talked to started out the conversation without identifying himself by saying, "We have to finish up some details. It shouldn't take more than 30 minutes." I was confused and five minutes into the call, he asked for my bank routing number and checking account number. Red flag. I asked, "Why do you need to know that?" That's when he realized that I hadn't received "The Letter"... He said, "Your request for disability has been approved. Congratulations. You're retired."
Retired for medical reasons. I'm not ready to retire and I don't FEEL disabled. Shit, I'm only 58 years old.
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