Reevaluate This!
Disabled folks dread that perpetually recurring time of the year. It’s when those of us who avail ourselves of certain public support programs have to be reevaluated to make sure we are still eligible. In other words, we must prove we are still crippled.
In my case, reevaluation day takes the form of an annual (more or less) home visit from a social worker from the Illinois Department of Human Services. DHS pays the wages of the members of my pit crew, which is what I call the people I hire to come to my home every day and help me put on my pants, take a shower, et cetera.
During these visits, the DHS social worker asks me if I still have the same disability I had the last time I was reevaluated. I say yes. She asks me if I still need help putting on my pants, taking a shower, et cetera. I say yes again. She asks me to spell the word “world” backward. I say d-l-r-o-w. I’m suspicious of that question. I guess it’s some kind of cognitive test. But how much weight does it carry? What if I choked under pressure and spelled it wrong? Would that make me too incompetent to qualify? Or does spelling it right make me too competent to qualify? I don’t know.
Hey, I know some sort of reevaluation process is necessary. Sometimes, people are temporarily crippled and may no longer qualify. I just think people like me, who are always going to be at least as crippled as we are now, ought to be grandfathered in somehow. It’s like making an older person prove every year that they’re still over sixty-five.