Indiana Social Security Disability Attorney

When will I ever learn? Upon return from my vacation, I started to get the sniffles. Sneezing. A summer cold, I thought. Coughing. I went to work on Monday and was determined to get started on getting caught up from being gone a week. Mid-afternoon I was really slowing down, but I pressed on, even though I wanted to go home and go to bed. Boy, I thought, I had really gone soft from that week of sleeping in. Stephanie, my paralegal, even told me I looked pale. I thought, oh, I don’t feel that bad—I will press on. I was glad I made it to 5:30 before I finally went home.

Next day I struggled on. Boy, is this cold annoying, I thought. On Wednesday morning, at about 10:30 (if I had looked at my watch I could tell you the exact time), both my ears suddenly ‘closed off’ and both suddenly began to hurt with that pain you get when you have a cold and fly on a jet. Ah, I thought, I will just take some decongestant when I go home tonight, and my ears should open up on their own soon. By 2:30 PM, I could not take the pain anymore and finally went home to take some decongestant. I waited for my ears to open and the pain to go away. At 1 AM, when I still could not fall asleep due to the pain, I finally wised up and took some Tylenol.

Next morning I thought the pain had gone away and debated about calling the doctor. I finally decided to let him take a look. I continued to work from home. At my appointment that afternoon, he found that both my ears did “look bad.” Double ear infections. Antibiotics were prescribed.

Did I stay home and rest the next day? No. Stubborn me, I went to work for a while, until I finally recognized that I was worthless. Did I stay home on Monday to get well? Nope. I thought I was doing so much better. I could work. Stephanie commented that I looked tired. I finally went home. I will not bore you with the details of how I continued to go into work when I should have stayed home and gotten well because I did not realize how sick I was.

I should have known better. Stephanie has worked for me for several years. She knows me. When she told me I looked pale, I should have remembered that the last time she commented about how I looked pale, I finally went to the doctor to discover I had severe bronchitis/walking pneumonia and was sick for three weeks. When Stephanie tells me I look pale, I should know that means ‘you need to see a doctor immediately because you are really sick.’ I did not get the hint. But both times, I did not want to believe that I was that sick, I did not think I felt that sick, and it never registered to me how sick I really was. I thought I was capable of doing much more than I could.

I see this all the time. My disabled clients want to believe that they can do more than they really can. I remember the man who came in with his family. They had finally gotten him to come in and begin to think about applying for his Social Security Disability. He and his wife sat in the first row and his grown kids were in the second row. I asked him to tell me what he could still do. While he was telling me, his kids were shaking their heads “NO!” until one finally said: “Dad, you have not been able to do that for three years.” He turned around and looked at his child. The other ones all shook their heads in agreement. Dad, like me, did not think he was that bad off and it had never registered with him what he could not do. Both of us were not good ‘eye witnesses’ about ourselves. We needed those that really knew us to tell us the truth about how we really were. Neither of us invited the assessment. We just assumed that we knew what we could do. Neither of us decoded the hints that were given to us.

I advise client’s to invite their loved ones to give them an honest, blunt, no holds barred assessment of what they can and can not do. Pick a good day when you can take it, and give them permission to tell you what they see. Go to your doctor and find out what he or she really thinks you can do. Evaluate what they say. Test it out. You may find out that like me, you are a really bad ‘eye witness’ for yourself when you do not have this information.

When you talk to Social Security about your medical conditions, you want to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Don’t be a bad witness for yourself. Test your assessment against what your family and your doctor sees. See if you need to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ like I needed to. Don’t let you fool yourself into thinking you can do more or less than you can. Take the steps to become a good witness for yourself by figuring out what you used to be able to do before your medical impairments and what you can do now.