Woman to government: My inability to remember qualifies me as disabled

Tina Kitchel stirred awake in Spring Valley Hospital with a tube in her mouth and her arms riddled with needle marks from an IV.

Her husband stood at her bedside, relieved to see her awaken. She stared back at him like he was a stranger in a crowd. There was so much she didn’t know.

Nearly two weeks prior, she was in the third trimester of pregnancy — their second child. A complication stopped her heart for 27 minutes. Doctors performed an emergency cesarean section in the hallway of the hospital to rescue her child — and bring her back to life. She had been in a coma for the past 13 days.

My husband was training an employee to do a fairly simple task, each day she would master the task and be doing fine. Hubby told me the problem was every day she showed up it was as if she had forgotten what she had learned before, he literally had to train her every morning. He trained people for years and said she was the only one he felt he could not train. I have no idea if the woman he tried to train had some sort of issue or if her mind just couldn’t wrap around that sort of work, but not remembering really can be an issue to holding a job.

My wife has always had difficulties her lower back also from being abused as a child and was also in a car accident and had to have three vertebrae in her neck fused together. She used to work as an activity director in Nursing Homes, a job which frequently requires moving large people who sometimes are basically dead weight especially when away from the facility. It was challenging for her when she was younger but she was able to make do. Now she really can't do that type of work anymore.

We don't consider her disabled at this point because there are things that she can do... so she does a lot of volunteer work. She never applied for unemployment because there were complications after her surgery where she had some very bad digestive problems and lost a lot of weight (down to well under 80 pounds). We really weren't sure if she was even going to make it for a while. And she could not work at that time or even volunteer. So she is also now just a few years from being able to collect normal Social Security.

She has been trying to find work because things have been tight for our family these past few years. Unfortunately, now that she hasn't worked for several years; it is very difficult for her to find a job especially especially given that she has some limitations. When we were younger she never had any difficulties... she is very good at interviews, but now that she is older and has had some health issues... no one even calls back for a followup.

We are going to be fine, but we have a greater understanding of the difficulties other people are going through.

We do know other people who are very good at taking advantage of the system. We are very close to someone who spent 27 years enlisted in the Airforce. She started having disc problems in her neck and had two of her vertabret fused. Then she went off on disability. She gets a substantial retirement but she gets a much larger amount every month from her "disability".

Her husband is a full bird colonel. She of course didn't know what to do with herself after her structured life in the military came to an end. She ended up getting hooked on prescription pain medications. Her situation is kind of a mess at this point, but it is amazing the amount of government dollars she is pulling in. It is over twice what my wife ever made while she was working.

“No, the hippocampus is responsible for giving you the ability to process short-term memory, not remember the past. It’s where the things which just happened to you are temporarily stored until your brain can process them and put them into longer-term storage. If it is damaged, you can no longer remember things. Hers was permanently damaged, along with other past memories, leaving her without the ability to process new memories, as well as severely fractured memories of certain past events. “

If it is as you describe it, then indeed she would be disabled.

Read this book, by Dr. Oliver Sacks, which is a fascinating series of essays about patients he's treated with neurological conditions:

Particularly the chapter "The Lost Mariner", who destroyed his hippocampus through alcoholism. As recounted in the Wikipedia entry on the book:

"The Lost Mariner", about Jimmie G., who has lost the ability to form new memories due to Korsakoff's syndrome. He can remember nothing of his life since the end of World War II, including events that happened only a few minutes ago. He believes it is still 1945 (in the late 70s and early 80s), and seems to behave as a normal, intelligent young man aside from his inability to remember most of his past and the events of his day-to-day life. He struggles to find meaning, satisfaction, and happiness in the midst of constantly forgetting what he is doing from one moment to the next.

I recall when living in the midwest during the 80’s, the church we were attending had a ministry helping residents in a senior citizen apartment building that was open for government welfare recipients. The old folks were great, but.... one year they started renting to alchololics of any age. The seniors were afraid to leave their apartments, the social room where they would play cards before now wreaked of alchohol. The govenment had declared alchoholism a disability and made the housing unit open to them.

Also, the children on learning disability drug (can’t recall name) were declared on government disability also.

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