Karma

By lex, on August 7th, 2008

So, today was pretty close to the last of my transition requirements, the good lord willing and the crick don’t rise. A trip back to the VA medical center for an ortho exam. Having flung a motorcycle into the dust at high speed some years ago, and carrying around in consequence a titanium plate with seven small screws through my tibia, there are Concerns about Consequences.

One among the dreary little secrets of leaving the service is this disability vig. The separation physicals were originally designed to help people who had been wounded in the line of duty by providing them a compensatory payment for the future earnings they’d left by in the service of their country. For many years this was done by deducting income from a retirement check and returning it to the disabled veteran tax free.

In time all injuries incurred during service came to be covered, not just those received during wartime service, in combat. And these days, retired servicemen who are more than 50% disabled receive non-taxable co-payments on top of their full retired pay. It’s not a lot of money – a 100% disabled vet with dependents might receive as much as $36,000 per year tax free – but neither is it nothing. It’s a noble idea, keeping faith with our troops and all that. But because the service does not recruit exclusively from within the ranks of the Vienna boy’s choir, the system has potential for abuse.

He said, with calculated understatement.

A man might mention to a retiree of his casual acquaintance that he’d soon be heading to the VA for his disability evaluation, and the other fellow might whisper in a conspiratorial way, “Sleep apnea.” Coupled with a wink, in case the point had been lost. “Automatic 50% disability.”

At first surprised, and then offended, your man might well reply that he doesn’t have sleep apnea. At which point his interlocutor will look at him askance, clearly thinking him either a fool or an insufferable moralist, or both. Or else he might, depending on his native intelligence, continue on in an optimistic vein, “Tinnitus, then?”

It gets tiresome after a while, and if it’s that for those of us going through it just the once, imagine the sentiments of those on the other side of the examination table who every day are faced with legions of the limping, batches of the bedridden, clusters of the crapulous. All of them moaning on about one or another more or less authentic disability. Or else superannuated captains on the retired list (is that redundant?) carrying the burden of the years atop a gammy leg. Oh, dear. Gone. Shot off.

There is a lot of sighing and waiting around at the VA clinic. Much officious ruffling of paperwork. Occasionally there are little people with small bits of power which they are mightily tempted to viciously abuse. I was lucky in that category, but I have to admit that having lost the right to insist upon a rank before my name, the title of “mister”  might go a fair part towards conciliating reciprocal good will for those not of close personal acquaintance. Among the patients there I was very nearly the only one there without a cane or walker. I guess I didn’t get the memo.

In time I was summoned into the presence of the orthopod, a remarkably professional and very attractive woman many years my junior. After brief introductions and a cool handshake, the good doctor asked me a number of questions from a checklist before kindly asking me to strip to the waist. After a brief physical examination – having thus attained a position of immense moral superiority that stood in vivid contrast to her rather diminutive physical stature – she subsequently offered me a smock that I might have done with all the rest of it.

Up on the table, dad, and before you know it there were limbs being manipulated this way and that by a pair of lissome arms while pressures were applied hither and yon, in consequence of which smocks were riding up past the point of perfect modesty and your correspondent was left for to do multiplication tables in his noggin as a way of absenting himself mentally from a situation that offered to slip very far away from his physical control.

All good things come to an end, however, for we were sent forthwith down to radiology to be prodded and slapped around in odd poses against cold pieces of gear by a technician whose familiarity with dental hygiene could only be described as glancing. If there’s anything more impersonal than being shoved about like a slab of meat on a cold table while an X-Ray machine whirrs and clicks above you, then thank you, but I’ll have none.

Ups and downs.

Karma.

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