Time out

I started the day with a phone call to Welfare Rights. The Fox had pointed out the letter I received on Thursday did state I was to fill in the Employment & Support form if I was in receipt of Incapacity Benefit or Severe Disablement Allowance, neither of which I any longer receive. I had had my first ESA payment earlier this week.

Welfare Rights confirmed what I had been told the day before was wrong. They certainly would not require I newly filled questionnaire for the purposes of the appeal. It is strange I should have been sent another form so soon. They suspected the form had been sent by mistake. They gave me the phone number for ATOS, the organisation to which the form is sent.

I rang ATOS. No, they don’t why I was sent the form but I should go ahead & fill it in anyway. They were not responsible for sending out the forms. That was the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP). I asked if there was any means to discover if the form was sent by mistake as filling in all these forms is taking quite a toll on me. They gave me the phone number for the DWP.

I rang the DWP. They concluded the reason why I had been sent the form was because the ATOS doctor I had seen in October had given me a 3 month prognosis, so they needed to know how I was after that.

I blew up. I apologised to the person who I was talking to at the other end of the phone as I realised it wasn’t her personally, but this is just plain stupid. I had only just posted the appeal to the previous decision the day before. The medical conditions stopping me from seeking work, I have had now for over 20 years. In all that time my health has just deteriorated as further problems have arisen due to my lack of mobility & active healthy life. How on earth was I supposed to improve in just 3 months? Still it seems I must fill in the form again. They have noted my comments.

I then settled down to my ironing. As I did I thought over what was said. There seems no way to question the doctor’s prognosis. The more I thought, I couldn’t help thinking the doctor probably wrote something to the effect that the pancreatitis I gained this year should be under control within 3 months. And that is all the DWP saw. But to me, the pancreatitis is hopefully a temporary blip which will come under control soon and cause me no more subsequent bother than the Chronic Kidney Disease I have. It is the problems with my knees & depression that are the reasons why work is an impossibility, not the pancreatitis.

As I finished the ironing & went to boot up the computer to get to work with the form, the Fox suggested why don’t why we go out for a change. It was dry, if overcast. The car could do with a run. So we decided to go over to Arnside, our old stomping ground where we lived for over twenty years. So we did.

Arnside has changed a lot in some ways since we left 13 years ago. It seems to be prospering. Our favourite pub, the Albion, has extended with a large restaurant. Access for wheelchairs has improved considerably. Gaz, the former manager of the Pub, is now manager here & greeted us with friendly abuse. We talked to an Arnsider born & bred who we recognised by sight & reminisced about former friends and acquaintances. Altogether it was a real breath of fresh air, a chance to put some perspective into life. We came home much refreshed in body – we had lunch at the Albion, which sells good food these days unlike it did in our days there - & soul.

One thing I can’t help wondering is if it is worth pursuing my ESA appeal any more. Any decision is only going to be overturned by the decision made on this application. The one good thing making the appeal has done is to jolt me into discovering what the criteria are for ESA so this time I can tweak the form to them, bring out the relevance of what I am saying, add some things which hadn’t seemed strictly relevant before. It’s not so much a case of lying or making up things, rather of bringing out the implications which a non-disabled person would not realised were there. Maybe this time they will come to the right decision first time. I hope so. I certainly don’t think I can cope with these forms every few months.