Saturday, February 21, 2015

Physical Disabilities

Written January 14, 2015

Yesterday I took the forms my doctor had signed to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and in return I was issued a handicapped/disability hang-tag for parking.  It is supposed to help me when my fibromyalgia or asthma are acting up.  Lately my back and my knees begin killing me with little to no provocation.

Still, there's this voice inside me saying that I'm cheating, that I'm a faker, and there are people out there who really need help.  After some thought, it came to me who that voice really belongs to.  When I was in the fourth grade, I had really bad stomach troubles.  I missed a lot of school and had a lot of testing done.  In the end the doctors couldn't find what was wrong.  I remember that evening, being told that I needed to go out by the road where my step-father was working on a car.  He told me that the doctors didn't find  nothing wrong with me so there weren't nothing wrong with me.  He was yelling at me by that point, spittle flying out at me as from a rabid dog attack.  "You're just faking this shit!  You're going to school and you're doing your work (around the house and yard)! I better not hear anything else about this or I'll whip your ass!  Do you hear me?!"  My ears rang with his screaming and with his slap upside my head.  He always seemed to hit my ears.

And damn it all, my ears still ring - both of them - from his fits of anger.  In retrospect, I know what my stomach problems were all those years ago: acid stomach or nervous stomach and a spastic colon.  Quite frankly, it's a wonder I didn't have ulcers before I was 16.

All these years later when again there is something really wrong with me, I can hear his voice still telling me that I'm faking to put others out.  It's a damn nuisance really.  Will there ever be a time when I have my head space all to myself?  Will there ever be a time when all the other voices, those bitter, negative voices will fall permanently silent?  I don't know.  But I sure am going to work on it - one little thing at a time.

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