I wanted to make sure that not only did I have a personal rebuttal to the absurd assertions put forth by the LTD, but that my entire situation was explained to a judge in an appropriate manner. 

My personal statement, redacted in PDF format, can be found here.  As with this site and this page, it was put together through a collaboration of interested parties, most notably family and my attorney.

History of Claim

I began by summarizing the history of my claim and facts surrounding the termination of my benefits.  I kept it fact based… unemotional.  I occasionally referred to some of the egregious actions stating I would cover them in more detail later in the document.

Personal Synopsis

I briefly introduced myself, my background (education, employment), and my family.

Illness Onset and Background

I felt it was important for the reader to have a timeline of the conditions I had gone through and the efforts I went through to have it evaluated and corrected before I finally had to go out in disability.  In my case this process was about 18 months and I wanted to get across that going out on disability is something that I took lightly and did without first exhausting all alternatives and treatments.

Impact of Illness on my Family

People all too often think people are just going out on disability so they can get paid to stay home.  Well, I’m sure there are some of those too, but I needed to differentiate myself from them.  I fully explained the financial impact of my not working as well as the emotional grief it caused my family.  I wanted them to come out of this section with a strong understanding that this illness is quantifiable and very costly; not something someone does just to stay home all the time.

Diagnosis Synopsis

Here again, assuming the audience is eventually a judge, I wanted the reader to have a full appreciation of the diagnoses I have received and educate them fully on those conditions.  I briefly touched on the supporting testing and physicians responsible for those diagnoses.

Debilitating Conditions Objective Medical Evidence

Remembering that it is not a diagnosis that determines eligibility for disability, but the severity of the limitations from one’s illness, I listed all the relevant testing and physicians responsible.  This is groundwork for the discussion to follow.

Debilitating Conditions

This is really the meat of my argument for disability benefits.  I introduced the reader to each of my primary debilitating conditions, in my case excessive fatigue, cognitive deficits, and disorientation.  For each of the conditions I went into detail on how the condition affected me as well as linking the specific objective medical evidence that confirmed the condition.  As with the rest of this document, this must be done in an unemotional fact based manner.

Personal Activities

As one of the key issues the LTD had with my credibility was the fact that I did volunteer activities and things with my kids, I felt I had to address this head on and put it in context of the illness, which they clearly did not understand… or at least pretended not to. 

I began this section by educating the reader on the unique characteristics.  It took several months of ordering about a dozen books, but we found many citable sources (which you can now find on this site) that explained CFS in a manner which is very helpful to support PWC with doing activities but nonetheless disabled.

Once this understanding of the illness was established, I reviewed each of the LTD’s ‘gottchas’, putting them in context with the nature of the illness.  By the end of the section I had not only admitted to each and every one of their ‘gottchas’, but informed them of many other things I do as well.  I concluded with “However, I do each of these at my own pace as my illness allows, which many days is not at all, and if there’s an extra puppy accident or two in the house, we’ll just have to deal with it.”

Closing Comments

A brief commentary on their responsibility to honor the contract and their poor handling of the case.  I rather enjoyed the last sentence but was mildly worried about it until my attorney reassured me ‘sometimes you gotta call it like you see it.’