Louis Shalako
Applying for a disability pension is a last-ditch
resort. No one wants to end up on disability—no one in their right mind, that
is. You really would have to be crazy, which will become clearer as we go
along.
After an accident, an illness, an injury, people
struggle along as best they can, perhaps not understanding the life-changing
nature of what has happened to them. Most people already have a home. Honestly,
they really do. Later, they might be told this is an asset and they must live
on that asset, until their assets are down to an acceptable level of poverty,
before they can come back and apply for disability again. They do what they can
to find work, just trying to pay the bills and keep that roof over their head.
If someone has children or dependents, feeding them takes priority. I was lucky, in that I didn’t have any assets,
nor any dependents…welcome to the topsy-turvy, upside down and inside out world
of the disability pension.
It is a world where every fact is a lie and every statement
must be examined with great care.
It might take a bit of a push, some extraordinary
event to get someone to apply at all. People who apply for ODSP typically need
it.
In my own case, I had gone back to school for a couple
of years. I had sent resumes all over Canada and put applications in all over
town without getting a bite. I was in a lot of pain, I had no skills (other
than journalism and other communications courses) and the only jobs I could
ever get, paid the most minimal wages. Some jobs were part-time, seasonal, odd
jobs and self-employment of a creative nature.
Months and years went by when I had no income at
all—not even welfare. I was a scrounger, a mooch, a bum. I lived in the
parent’s basement. I picked up beer bottles and cans, and I drove guys to the
mall to shoplift. I used the parent’s borrowed car to do that. This was good
for a bit of gas money or a couple packs of smokes…you need a source for the
narcotic pain pills by this time anyways.
For three or four years I was on Welfare (now called
Ontario Works, with the government’s knack for ironic propaganda generation)
before I went back to school.
Welfare was about five or six thousand a year, and the
student loans and grants were more like eighty-eight hundred a year. This was a
calculated risk. Those loans will never be repaid as far as I can project, that
is to say not within the next five or ten years. But, for better or worse,
that’s where I got all those skills, including journalism, broadcasting,
marketing, photography, etc.
It was a way to learn how to write, which is a whole
other story and not really important here.
But for years I had tried to get into this plant or
that shop, always with an eye to making it through the probationary period and
getting on full time, preferably with a union. I knew I had a bad back, even
then, and I thought many things. If I could just make it into a union, I
thought…then someone would go to bat for me if real problems came along. I knew
my back was screwed in my mid-twenties, at least for the jobs I was getting. At
a later date, the thoughts changed: if I can just get some education, if I can
just make it through school, if I can just get in the door in some good place,
a newsroom, a TV or radio station…anything, really. Anything at all would have
done by that point.
(Ultimately, I did work at a small newspaper, and even as a
baby photographer for a brief period.)
My goal was to try and find an appropriate job. I
tried everything, and applied anywhere I could think of, wildly over-reaching
as often as not. I tried taxi-driving, and found that twelve hours in a car was
more than my lower back could take. Working as a security guard was all right,
but the five-buck an hour part-time wages meant that I would always be living
in my dad’s back bedroom. Yet at one time
I had made a lot more money—and we
sort of have our expectations. I even lost the security job, and
I had at least
two different ones—one in Sarnia, which lasted for about fourteen months, and
one extremely temporary one in London. They did train me, though.
Observe, identify, and report—mall cop stuff to be
sure.
The whole time I was taking narcotic pain medications.
I had to have those pills to work. I had to have them just to make it through
the day. This is not always a good idea, when you are working with power tools,
heavy machinery, or driving a cab. There were times when I was nodding off on
the job as a security guard—and this was at the Shell fuel terminal.
I was a walking bag of liabilities for any employer
who figured things out, right? They all have to make it past the scrutiny of
Workmen’s Compensation, (now Workplace Safety and Insurance Board) site
inspections and their own private liability insurance provider’s inspection. In
a chemical plant these are serious considerations.
I’ve had a few good jobs in my life—mostly when I was
younger.
At first, not having a doctor, and sort of erroneously
believing that they simply wouldn’t believe me anyways, I bought painkillers on
the street for fifty cents a pill, a buck a pill, whatever the going rate was.
It was only when I heard about a certain doctor, from an acquaintance, that I
got the scrip for Tylenol 3.
“Come on, Louis, half the speedos in town go to
him—the other half go to that other guy, but he’s my doc and he’ll set you
right up.”
This turned out to be correct.
Each tablet has 30 mg of codeine, and codeine is an
opiate. It’s addictive, even if you didn’t have any pain. The trouble with the
Tylenol, is that it gives you a real lift. I was never a speedo or heroin
junkie. The lift wasn’t what I was looking for. What I wanted was pain relief.
Discussing this with my doctor, he was easily persuaded to prescribe Lorazapam,
a member of the diazepide group, which includes Valium and a host of other
similar drugs, branded and generic. The Tylenol got you high, and the Lorazepam
kept you from bouncing off the walls all day long like Ricochet Rabbit. Among
other things, Lorazepam is cheap—and it’s listed in the ODSP approved meds
catalogue that all Ontario doctors keep right there on the desk…
I discovered that doctors love to prescribe pain
pills. I also discovered that people will pay you good money for your meds.
There’s just a whole shit-load of issues here, and
while some may think I am incriminating myself unnecessarily, some of this
really needs to be said.
(Consulting with the legal department indicates the
statute has long since run out. — ed.)
I went back to the doctor more than once, eventually
persuading them to prescribe 90 Tylenol 3s every two weeks. I began by taking
them as prescribed, one pill every four hours or about three pills a day. Some
days maybe even less, if there was little pain and I didn’t really need pain
control. At first I was selling the bulk of them for fifty cents each, but
seven years later I was taking five or six of those pills a day myself. Six or
seven years later, I was up to six or seven Lorazapem a day, and that stuff is
real strong bug juice. This is exactly what they call it in jail, and some of
them guys ought to know.
One day my dad asked me a question. It was kind of a
hurtful question.
“So. What’s your big plan for today?”
I was laying on the couch, watching TV and it must
have been his day off. He had a really good job in Chemical Alley, and he had
always aspired to the same thing for me. I hadn’t worked in a while. In fact, I
had been a real disappointment to him. Every time I got into one of the plants
on a tryout, they dropped me before the ninety-day probationary period was up.
They do this to everybody, it’s common knowledge, but over time I think he just
lost hope, or faith, or respect for his own son…not that he had all that much
to begin with.
I told him that my back was on fire and I wasn’t
planning on doing anything much at all. This was after a long history,
including a fall from a scaffold in 1989, where there is an incident report and
all that sort of thing. One of the things we need to do is ‘document things’
when applying for disability.
“Well, if your back is really that bad, why don’t you
apply for disability?”
All these years later, I don’t know if that was so
snarky after all. Memories dim with time, and the more painful, the dimmer they
get in some natural psychological survival mechanism.
The next morning, I went downtown and picked up the
forms to apply for ODSP. I can’t recall the exact details, but at that time I
was on welfare and they probably provided the forms, as half the disabled
people in the province ended up on welfare over the years. Some of them are
still on it, decades later.
There but for the grace of Darwin go I.
Bringing the forms home and filling them out was one
thing. There is a little box on one sheet where you describe the nature of your
disability, and a box where you describe the impact on your life—in my case,
painful sitting, standing, unable to lift heavy objects without risk of
re-injury, all kinds of things. This is where taking every shit job that came
along tends to haunt you. It gives you an employment history—maybe that’s not
so good, but mine was definitely spotty and intermittent. It’s a small box and
there’s not much room to write there…
They ask about employment history, and all this is
taken into account in some way.
I worked here and there, some of those jobs were
menial, heavy labour, and even though I might have only lasted a few days or
weeks, it played against me. Back then, the criteria included the following
phrase.
“…unable to seek, hold and maintain regular,
renumerative employment due to the nature of their disability…” or words to
that effect.
This is important, because I could still walk—I could
still talk, I still had some kind of skills.
The way I looked, I could apply for some sort of shit,
unskilled job and stand a fair chance of getting the job. Keeping that job was
another thing. I recall one job in particular, where I was hired full time but
had to quit after four hours. It involved cutting strips of screening and sheet
metal, on a table-brake or a set of foot-stomper shears. Metal workers will
perhaps know what I’m talking about, but the name of the machine eludes me. The
pain was so bad I couldn’t go back the next day. This happened sooner or later
at every job I had successfully gotten.
There is a process to apply for ODSP.
You take the forms to the doctor, and he sort of tries
to dissuade you. I was a young guy. I wasn’t really going to the doctor
regularly, and this was the first time he’d heard of it.
What happens is the doctor, and later the ODSP
themselves, or the Ministry of Community and Social Services themselves, send
you to specialists. They want more information. You submit your application
with whatever information you can provide. Then you wait. And a few months
later, you get a letter in the mail saying you have been turned down.
The Ministry sends you all kinds of mail. You’ve given
them an application consisting of a few pages, and two weeks later you get
something back from them. The gist of it is that you have rights.
On the face of it, they are saying that you have
rights, and at the same time, this package that comes in the mail is a bulky
envelope with a quarter of an inch of materials in it. It took a while before I
caught on. They have gotten so many complaints from applicants who feel their
rights were violated, that legislation had to be enacted, ensuring that all
applicants are fully informed of their rights.
But it’s also a bit of a snow-job. In that package,
they also had questions, they had requests for further information. If you do
not comply, your application will be denied—surely the government has the right
to full and complete information before making a decision. If you do not agree,
you may appeal.
If you do not provide the information by a certain deadline,
the application will be denied. Then there is some rule that you have to wait
six months or a year before you can apply again. The whole process is like that—Catch-22,
damned if you do and damned if you don’t, they present you with all kinds of
stuff to read about the process, your rights, duties and obligations under the
system. They want more and more and more information. They’ve got you running
off to London to see an orthopedic surgeon, and they’ve got you in the MRI
machine, and they’ve got some guy injecting cortisone into your lower back and
hip, and at some point I began to wonder at the nature of the game. What are
the rules of engagement, and how is it played? I know how to lose by this
point—I’ve already done it. No one knows how to win, but win they somehow
did—often with a lawyer, and the rules of evidence. They were persistent. When
they were denied, they bided their time and went back. What you are fighting
against is a snow-job.
How many times, how many people have told me that
their doctor didn’t get the forms in on time, before the deadline.
Duh.
Many.
Many, many people.
That’s why they send a guy claiming back injuries or
chronic back pain for a psychological exam. (If you don’t show up, the claim is
denied, right? The client is presented with one more opportunity to fail.)
And yet, to your certain knowledge, they have already
read a number of medical reports stating your injuries, the ongoing nature of
it, the permanence, the pain, the suffering, and they don’t seem to care about
that at all.
You wonder what the hell’s wrong with them, but you
soon learn: they send everybody for a psychological exam. That’s just a fact.
They send everyone.
If you ask about it, they always say the same thing:
“We treat all of our clients, (and applicants), the same way...”
It’s true enough, too. They treat all of their clients
and applicants like shit, ladies and gentlemen.
Apparently, it is the policy of ODSP that every single
person who ever walked through their door was a no-good piece of shit, someone
set on defrauding the system.
This appears to be their standard operating procedure.
***
One of the real eye-openers with the ODSP application
process is the obligatory psychological exam.
Every person I ever spoke to said
they had been obliged to attend this exam. Now, I would be the first to point
out that there is a good case to be made for this exam. So many people who fall
through the cracks of our educational system, our employment system, and our
social support system, are suffering from some form of mental illness.
More than anything, they want to identify the people
who are going to fall through the cracks of the system and make sure they do it
quicker…or something like that.
Children who suffer from mental illness, or any one of
a thousand other ailments typically do not do well in the school setting. It’s
fair to say that steps have been taken and the situation is different today
than it was thirty or forty years ago when I attended school. But a lot of
applicants aren’t all that literate or all that educated to begin with. The
mentally ill are particularly easy to stigmatize, for when you maybe talk to
someone for the first time, or for a limited time, they might not tell you
their entire life story—probably not their entire medical history, all in the
first go. This affects their education, it affects their self-image and it
affects their ability to navigate the system and be an effective advocate for themselves.
It affects their employment prospects and their fates in general.
It’s easy to assume someone is a criminal—for surely
many of them (or us) present in exactly this fashion.
Some guy swilling back a beer, handing you a meth-pipe and
telling everyone that he’s got court tomorrow for assaulting someone isn’t
necessarily the most sympathetic character to begin with.
Yet there are certain implied issues there. This is
not the typical, average model of behaviour in this particular cultural mode,
i.e. Canada, in a relatively prosperous city in a developed part of the
country.
Then when you find out he’s got a record as long as
your arm, going back years, and you also find out they’re on welfare or ODSP.
Now you’re halfway to stigmatizing someone. It’s pretty easy to do, especially
if we don’t know much about mental health, or the process of socialization in
children, or the longer term effects of child abuse, beatings, sexual
interference, deprivation or neglect…we need to ask those questions, and
sometimes the person themselves might not be the best witness or most objective
narrator of their life so far.
All we have is a snapshot of how they are right now,
and sometimes it ain’t pretty.
Suffice to say the psych exam is Standard Operating
Procedure for the ODSP. They probably do detect, suspect, or confirm, many
cases where the applicant does indeed suffer from some form of severe, chronic,
permanent or ongoing mental health issue—one (or more) of which might seriously
affect their ability to seek, obtain, and to hold, regular, and renumerative
employment. To be fair to this aspect of the public health system, many
applicants go on to get treatment and support through this system.
In other words they need support. They actually need
ODSP and the system recognizes this.
What is interesting is that the sort of experience I
had, and the answer I got from the social worker I was dealing with.
The doctor asked certain questions, at face value
looking for specific answers, but also pushing your buttons a bit and trying to
elicit a response—which it did.
“Do you hear voices?”
“Only enough to formulate speech—there’s nothing wrong
with my hearing, doctor.”
I pressed my social worker for the result of this
exam, and they tell you it’s all confidential—you don’t even have the right to
know what their assessment is. When pressed further, the lady told me,
‘Some
kind of anti-social personality disorder, but the psychiatrist really would
prefer not to say because a proper diagnosis takes more time than one
interview.”
Anti-social personality disorder. So they’re not
allowed to tell you, but somehow they told me. This may seem a bit ‘paranoid’
but what were they really trying to tell me?
I was just some guy who fell from a scaffolding. I was
just some guy who fell through the cracks of the Workplace Safety and Insurance
Board—an injured worker. And the government was trying to tell me that I was
crazy if I thought they were going to give me a disability pension for a back
that was broken in three places.
That’s what I got out of it, ladies and gentlemen.
When people are in pain, when people are desperate,
they’re just looking for help. They are looking for a friend. The system makes
a real bad impression sometimes, usually when you are at your most vulnerable.
We never ask enough questions, because we know so
little about the system we are dealing with.
I may not have all the answers, but I sure as hell got
a lot of questions.
END
