A day in the life of the self made man.

[Ms. Toad]

138. And you know that because you

go to their doctor's visits with them or are otherwise privy to their private medical information?

Allow me to introduce you to my daughter. She is 22 years old, and looks perfectly healthy. She goes to the gym most days to work out.

She also has a liver disease you can't see. That is only one of the chronic diseases she has. She needs about 14 hours of sleep a day just to make it upright until bedtime the next night - and sometimes 14 hours isn't enough. And sometimes, even though she is completely exhausted she can't fall asleep until 6 AM, the time she has to get up to go to the class she is taking (more about that later). That is called sleep inversion, a common problem with liver disorders.

Although she was valedictorian of her high school class, about half the time now, her brain is mush. We don't know whether it is because hepatic encephalopathy (a form of dementia associated with degenerative liver disorders), fatigue, sleep deprivation, or depression at being diagnosed at 18 with an illness that (at that time) had a prognosis of a mean of 10 years to death or transplant - or, perhaps the impact of the anti-depressants she is taking to combat the emotional impact of that diagnosis.

That class she is taking? Even though she is 22, and has been trying to attend school full time since she graduated at age 17, every semester she crashes and burns and loses 1/3 to 1/2 of the credits she has attempted. (Fortunately, thanks to the ACA, she no longer has to pretend to be full time in order to keep her insurance.) Her transcript looks like crap. So she is taking summer classes - to try to keep from taking longer than 6 years to graduate. The class she needs, if she has any hope of surviving organic chemistry in the fall, is only offered at 8:00 AM. Not really compatible with needing 14 hours of sleep a night. So every morning I set my alarm for 6 AM, crawl in bed with her, and pound on her long enough and hard enough to roll her out of bed so she can get her body into class. No alarm in the world would wake her, especially if it has been a sleep inversion night.

She is not on disability, only because I am still paying all of her bills. A good thing for you, because her average health costs per year run between $40,000 and $60,000. In the year(s) she needs a transplant - the cost will be around half a million. She would be unable to make it on her own without disablity. Who is going to pay someone with a high school diploma and an extremely crappy college transcript (but no degree), enough as part time worker (all she could manage) to cover costs like that. So, even if she might like to work part time - to feel better about herself - she literally couldn't afford to.

But, if she lived next door to you you would probably mistake her for someone taking advantage of government assistance because she looks like any healthy 22 year old, trotting off to the gym (which, incidentally, is probably keeps her from needing 16 hours of sleep a day).

Unless you are really significantly more involved than most people are in their neighbor's business (and by that I mean visiting the doctor with them, doing medical research on whatever their condition is, or other means of really understanding the details of whatever ails them), it is pretty presumptuous to accuse them of taking advantage of the system.