Tag Archives: pip

And breathe…(for a minute)

09 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Blog, DWP, Housing

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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.

 

PIP – my recurring nightmare

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Blog, Disability, DWP, Mental Health

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Sunday night, late September

Well, it was a blissful four months without any DWP contact at all. A glorious summer devoid of this specific anxiety, along with the harsh, tinny compressed tones of the Four Seasons that inevitably accompany it (due to Vivaldi-specific PTSD, I will never listen to that piece for pleasure again). It was also a summer of drastically worsening illness, in terms of fatigue and autonomic dysfunction, but also, paradoxically, much improved mobility as my powerchair arrived in June.

Now summer is over. The brown envelope arrived the day after our return from our late holiday in Vienna. The timing couldn’t have been more symbolic.
Your PIP runs out on December 17th. Please reapply.
I knew I would be facing reassessment this year, even though I only received my first payment in January. I knew I’d only get a year. But I didn’t realise that I would have to fully reapply, not renew. This has sent me into something of a mental spiral, remembering all the stress, anxiety, extra dissociative episodes which occurred while trying to complete the original form – and realising that I will probably have to do this all over again – perhaps only to be told that I don’t qualify after all and that I will have to go through another appeals process.

It’s past 5 in the morning. I’m too anxious to sleep even though tomorrow is only the phonecall to clear up the renewal/reapplication confusion. My brain kittens figure it never hurts to panic early.

Monday evening, mid-October

The forms have arrived. It took me over a week to summon the courage to call the number and wait on hold through 40 minutes of pain and intrusive noise last month. I asked about reapplication vs renewal, and got told that whatever was on the letter I was sent, that’s what to do. So starting again it is. The deadline is November 7th, so I doubt I will be assessed in what remains of 2016 (last time I waited 7 months from sending the application to the initial assessment).
This means that I will lose almost £62 a week from December when my PIP runs out, until it  is (potentially) reinstated, as the Severe Disability Premium added onto my ESA is reliant on my getting PIP. It’s almost like they expect me to fail.

We’re doing the forms tomorrow evening, using the ones from 2014 as reference. I know that a worsened condition (both physical and mental) gives me no guarantee that I’ll get the points to reflect this. Cynically, I think it would be a miracle if I even matched last year’s results (Enhanced rate care; nothing for mobility). I had to go to a tribunal to get that. I’m not sure I can deal with another year of my life essentially put on hold so I can ensure I have the support I need. It’s a bloody grotesque system.