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 July 04, 2009, 02:37:33 AM
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I'm copying here an e-mail I just sent to one of my very few Internet friends who has helped me out occasionally. Sorry. I'm in no shape to focus on keyboards.
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Nancy, if you feel up to hearing me talk about some very bad circumstances lately, please do. Let me just say that the most insane part of my housing assistance recertification was yesterday, when the person handling me at the Lake Co Housing Authority sent my landlords a letter cancelling me (LCHA pays vast majority of my rent), thereby putting me out on the street. The buildings manager called me to tell me, and I had to track down the LCHA person frantically, and someone caught her just as she was going out the door for 4th of July weekend. She told me it was just something she was doing to "cover herself legally" (??!!) and that things should be okay Tuesday when I'm being taken by Mark to their office to sign papers. Luckily the landlords accepted this when I told them, and the bldg manager told me about the insanity LCHA has been putting them through too. Suddenly it's all new personnel, trying to prove something by finding fault with every other thing.
The pressure of all the dangerous (to me), unpredictable, contradictory actions from the LCHA person have been making a wreck of me for two months or so. If I lose housing, I don't just have to move or become homeless. It's all different for someone who has to have a pitch black environment the second he needs it, etc... I'm vulnerable in a way people can't or don't "process" or get. So when the landlord called to tell me LCHA was pulling my living space out from under me, which would mean the end of my life (the filter I've prepared to keep light and fumes out I can't do without for even a short time), it was the worst shock I've had in years.
This shock altered me, my chemistry, and the unbearable "electricity" is way up and won't stop, no matter how much I try to sleep, even if I do sleep it's still just as high after. This is a disaster. All the pills I've relied on for decades stopped working suddenly. My brain is "fried" in a horrible way, and on top of the massive over-stimulation, I've become stupid. Every word I speak on the phone to fix situations sounds crazy and makes things worse. Simple tasks I can't do like operating a blood pressure device... I've used it often but can't now. Life is getting away from me when it's a crisis and I have to handle it. I'm three-quarters asleep.
I've left messages with 2 EI friends, and one I know has brain function lessening and the other called back to say she seems to have just acquired my sort of light sensitivity and is scared to death. We're all in deep trouble at the same time.
The LCHA person has mishandled the getting of a doctor's statement re my light sensitivity. Now since I didn't get that statement in time, she doubts my condition, and even if she pulls no surprises on me next Tuesday like keeping the lights on or throwing other bad things at me to try to get me out of public housing maybe, even if it resolves things for this year, I now know it's totally unpredictable at LCHA, they give reassurances they don't mean, they pull bizarre tricks, etc., so I'll have to spend this next year trying to find medical backup for medical statements so I won't have to go see them in daylight just to sign a few papers, and so they'll let me not have new glues paint etc in my apartment.
Finding such doctors is hopeless. It means research I can't do, and humiliating office visits with doctors who don't hear or respect me, and who won't tolerate being used as medical statement machines. They mis-hear my symptoms and try expensive treatments that don't apply to me, or don't have anything to offer and therefore won't stay with me. I gave up on MDs long ago for good reason... the huge problems, the impossibility of it all, and so as to stay sane. If I have to try to search for doctors it will take all year and I'll still fail, and I'll never get around to any search for a car, which I'll fail at too considering my limitations.
The pressure is making me much more hypersensitive to light etc.. and when I'm not believed by those with power to do this much harm, the shock is now unbearable and damaging, and it's maddening. I mean, in my gut I'm made to feel as if I must be pathetically crazy and faking even while the symptoms rise, and knowing better makes no difference. Somewhere in me I guess I'm saying to myself emotionally, no one in his right mind would do this to you if this medical disaster were real, therefore it can't be real.
I've just learned what "cognitive dissonance" means-- you believe one thing and deeply feel another, and the contradiction is jarring painful and damaging, if it's as severe as in my case that is. I've just heard the term used for people in denial of something real and bad about themselves, but it could be used for people who are being pressured beyond tolerance into believing untrue, bad things about themselves too.
I'm stopping here. I'm pushing myself intolerably. I know I have to have a lot of help from anyone who's online to find doctors though, and who knows what help I'll need Tuesday depending on how that appt. goes, and I hate to say I need a huge amount of support, but I do, and I hope you'll call.
******
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"You're better than normal! You're ABnormal!"-- Fry to Leela, who's self-conscious about her single eye, Futurama
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July 04, 2009, 05:38:24 PM
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Oh Geez, what a complete and utter nightmare. Go to a doctor with a friend, someone who can speak sense to a doctor. I know exactly how you feel, well, about this crap anyhow. At least they have to give a few nights stay in a motel in the 'cover their ass' crappola.  You're not alone...If I could give anymore support, I would. Thank you. After 29 years struggling to find that advocate and failing, how do I suddenly do it now, with eyes and brain limitations and not being able to go out for out for the most part? No one has seen in 29 years how limiting all this is. People say do this to get help, do that, and they're always exactly the things I can't do. I have just one friend who helps sometimes, and he isn't someone who could or would be an advocate. they have to give me a motel stay, is that what you mean? No they don't, all they have to do is put me out on the street if they feel like it, and I can't be in a motel. There's no way to make it dark enough or keep chemicals or perfumes out. My condition would snowball uncontrollably, damaging and sensitizing me and becoming actual torture. In no time I'd be reduced to screaming probably, and not able to explain because of the pain, poisoning, and electrical effects. When I say my life would be over, I'm not exaggerating. Everything would deteriorate very very fast. My nervous and immune systems are extremely sensitive.
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"You're better than normal! You're ABnormal!"-- Fry to Leela, who's self-conscious about her single eye, Futurama
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July 06, 2009, 06:08:01 AM
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I know...and if you do travel the road of torture and damage to get into hospital, there's no way to know if they'll even look hard enough to find an answer...'bandaid for a severed carotid' springs to mind.
In Australia, if the problem's only temporary, they must offer suitable temporary accomodation. When I got the police to take my ex husband out of my home, I didn't feel safe there, because I knew he'd organise to pick up his stuff at 3am with his gf in tow, and I just couldn't handle that. The Housing Ministry paid for me to spend one night in a city motel.
How can anyone be so cruel?
I'm lost now, and I think we're talking about very different things-- however the shock has actually lowered my brain function, so I'm missing more things. I'm talking about a government agency that pays most of my rent, enabling me to have a home, making demands that worsen my condition, and threatening to put me out on the street.
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"You're better than normal! You're ABnormal!"-- Fry to Leela, who's self-conscious about her single eye, Futurama
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July 08, 2009, 12:48:34 AM
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Bare bones update (that's now longer than intended), re housing mess, July 7 2009
Appointment went smoothly, bureaucratically that is. Another possible doom scenario occurred to me as I went to bed the night before and kept me awake, that and aspirin/caffeine. Neurologically, the accumulating eye/head pressure that had started 3 months ago or more, then shocks involved in housing recert, then the trip there today have all created a large new sort of shock to the nervous system (more than even I expected) that will take much to address. I was twitching like crazy throughout appt., which seldom happens, and housing person kept this demeanor she always has, slightly sympathetic-seeming and nice but not really, unphased and unaffected. She's a creature of bureaucracy I guess, caring only within set boundaries and unaware of any problems with that.
I ran into the woman who came to the apartment for a few years to do the recertifications. Her leg problem is better. I was wondering. It had been a bit difficult for her to make the trip but she did it anyway.
I notice now a growing sense of dignity-deficit. It's like the sense I used to get when bullied and I didn't stand up for myself I think. I'm bad at hating people. I'd decided I hated this housing person for that cowardly letter to my landlords and me last week, saying I was off the program and out on the street, sent to cover herself legally in some mysterious sense. I started the appt. "neutral" and by the end was thanking her for this and that, after 20 minutes of eye-pain-nausea and electrified twitching from light, shock, etc.. I feel a case of hollow stomach coming on, or appeasement-regret, or something. Still, people like that become like forces of nature, acting as an arm of bureaucracy without malice, so you can't hold it against them, but that's the problem too. It's not just that they sidestep blame, but that they do it successfully. You really can't blame them that much. Damn it.
On the plus side, if the papers really do go through alright (no proof yet), then I'm dealing with neutral-minded officious cogs, and therefore their actions are predictable once I find out their vision of the rules. I can prepare for next year.
Everything changes of course if I find tomorrow that Mark mis-spelled a word on a form and they're yanking my rent money over it. There must still be a copy of that letter cancelling me on file, and if that exists, I can't be secure. It's in print, therefore it's official, no matter what they say to me. At this point, there's no time left for appeals or corrections.
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"You're better than normal! You're ABnormal!"-- Fry to Leela, who's self-conscious about her single eye, Futurama
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