My PIP assessment results arrived over the weekend. I’ve been awarded higher rate care component (as before), but also higher rate mobility. This is the part that enables disabled people to lease adapted cars, if they wish. Right now neither C nor I can drive so I won’t be using it for that, but the extra money will definitely be helpful right now. It came as a massive surprise – I was expecting to get nothing for mobility again because I can walk a small amount with crutches. Is this the one time they took “safely, repeatedly, reliably” into account?
Also, amazingly, I don’t have to be reassessed until 2020. That’s almost four years of not panicking over it, unless someone reports me because they saw me standing up from my wheelchair. I don’t trust the abled public not to be vindictive arseholes almost as much as I don’t trust the DWP not to send letters to terrify us just for shits and giggles.

And that’s the good news.

The other sort-of-good news is that I filled in the Council’s homelessness help form and I “may qualify for help”. Heartening. Now I have the next form to fill out, which I’ve already done (albeit before being given an eviction date), and it’s coming up on a year since they received it and I’ve still not heard back…hmm. Hopefully they’ll let me submit another one.

In other trying-to-prevent homelessness stuff, I’ve been looking on various websites for places to rent (with housing benefit) and one thing is standing out to me: nowhere, including dssmove.co.uk, which specialises in properties which accept housing benefit, has an option to search for wheelchair accessible properties. I did find a website claiming to list all accessible properties available to rent or buy in the UK but when I checked yesterday they had precisely 0 properties that met my conditions (to rent, in UK).

Other things:

• My therapist has left the CMHT, which would be sad if I’d heard from him at all (aside from his farewell voicemail) since September. Still no word on when BPD group sessions start, so chances are I’ll have moved out of the catchment area by the time that happens.
• Still no joy getting a gut specialist appointment because I need to submit a stool sample first in case my obvious gastroparesis turns out to be H Pylori (hint: it isn’t). Trying to produce a stool sample with gut dysmotility and a stomach that won’t empty, at the right time of the morning to rush it down to the GP’s surgery… let’s just say it’s been *months* and it hasn’t happened. I asked my GP for a blood test instead and the hospital threw it away as they “only test stool samples”, and breath tests are only done on inpatients. Hell’s bells…
• It’s still my job to keep calling Stanmore and finding out whether they have reopened the waiting list for the pain rehab program.
• New GP seems fairly disinterested in helping me to find an accessible dentist or referring me to the hospital’s community dental clinic. Must push.
• Occasional suicidal ideation, mostly when I think about being placed in temporary housing – specifically B&B/hostel type places like when I was homeless at 17. I remember the fear and the desperation, and my brain goes “better kill yourself before it happens again”. No brain, stop it.

I’m using a lot of distractions this week. Mostly Poirot.