140321
John A. Brandecker, Director, Hunter Holmes McGuire Medical Center, 1201 Broad Rock Road, Richmond, VA, 23249
Document located at timism.com\VA.htm 140321 entry
Dear Mr. Brandecker,
Thank you for your March 12, 2014 letter in response to my letter dated February 4, 2014.
First of all, I find the word "dis-enroll" for "benefits cancellation" akin to using "rendering" for "torture."
I would like to know why and when my benefits were cancelled prior to January 17, 2014.
Importantly, does cancellation of my medication benefits include cancellation of my Emergency Room benefits, that is, if I show up with a broken limb or a stroke will I be told to go elsewhere. I sure do not want to find that I wasted valuable time in an emergency situation.
As to my cancelled medication benefit, that is, your sentence "In order for us to provide the safest possible care, it will be necessary for you to be evaluated by one of our physicians before medication from the VA system."
Some will ask why I am hesitant to visit the VA primary care unit. Well, every time I have complained about mistreatment by the VA system (blood clinic, ombudsman, blood clinic, blood technician, glasses, ER lecture), I have been mistreated even more. Adding insult to injury, my complaints have been resulted in my being marginalized as a "threat" based on treatment being delayed in the ER room until a security officer showed up to sit across from me. Adding further insult was my complaints being addressed by a VA envelope containing a folded postcard stating "It Takes the Courage and Strength of a Warrior to Ask for Help ..." Since you have clearly classified me as a threat--which I am not--I am simply afraid to be in the VA facility for fear of being restrained for my own good in a gulag akin the Soviet refusniks being hospitalized in psychiatric wards for their own good.
Am I threat? Maybe to myself. The badgering call from a social worker in which I finally gave her the answer she wanted rather than the truth did not change the truth. This week I launched www.Seed-Bees.com to help school PTA's raise money (It is too late for it to do its best this year thanks to the VA wasting my time taking away a simple benefit). Next week I will be coordinating for a second year a seedbee at my nearby elementary school. I am in the process of having my programming assistant from Punjab, India, relocating here to help launch Timism.com. These are the things I do when I am in a positive frame of mind, things which are checked off a long list of Things To Do for the world in which I live.
Positive Frame of Mind? Not as much as I used to be when I could stay awake for a period each day with the simple $9/month medication. (For the first time since the 1970s, I have purchased cocaine as an emergency anti-narcoleptic if I need it. Thanks, VA concerned with my health!)
Positive Frame of Mind? In the last two months, I have gained over twenty pounds. When one is frustrated, angry and sleepy, one is not so prone to remembering healthy living necessities. Food becomes a sedative.
Positive Frame of Mind? In the last two months, I have gone from a 5- to 7- hour nightly sleep to a helter-skelter miasma of eight to fifteen sleep episodes a day. Because I fall asleep so much so often during the day, I am not sufficiently tired at night to sleep continously. Because I do not want to disturb my wife tossing and turning, rising and reclining, I have been sleeping in an easy chair. Thanks, VA.
During the day, I find myself sitting or lying in a half-awake, half-asleep state with no motivation to do the things I know I can do and the things I want to do for others. The resentment and anger toward the VA rises until the flowing adrenaline motivates me as was the minutes before I got up and started writing this letter of complaint. And, I know that at some point, like a pacemaker dropping to low pings, that I will simply become not only too tired to stay awake but too tired to walk to the easy chair--cataplexy. God only knows how many times I have woke up at the keyboard slumped over with a terrible kink in my neck ... not remembering when I feel asleep.
I have experienced more anger in the last two months than in the last two decades. I have gained twenty pounds. I have always been motivated by a sadness for others' unhappy state but now I feel the depression of unhappiness from my being unhappy about my VA-induced state of mind. I cannot keep my thoughts together as I know that I otherwise would if I had the $9/month medication.
Once again, I am not a threat to the VA staff. However, despite my false answers to the badger, I would be a threat to myself in a very public way if the episodic depressions reached a certain depth. Increasingly, my empathy for vets committing suicide is understood more deeply from my personal experience: If a vet complains, he will be denied and marginalized till death.
Restating the two questions embedded in this letter:
Funny, I fell asleep at the keyboard. I left the "ssssssssss's" in for the full effect.
The second question is why is the VA wasting so much time when the claim of doctor evaluation is valueless and bogus in the present circumstance of ten-year prior medication. Is, as one person said, budget constraints has the VA engaging in creative accounting to reduce expenses sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssfssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssddddddddddddd (woke up long enough to try to finish the prior thought and bing--another crash). Off to the easy chair.
When my mother almost beat me to death at the age of eight for my complaining about her stealing my piggybank to feed herself in a house of eight hungry kids, I chose to leave home and pay my way by shining shoes 40-50 hours a week instead of live in hell. When the Virginia Attorney General used public funds for his gubernatorial campaign with invoices being fabricated in my name to hide the theft, I pursued until a special federal grand jury was empaneled which resulted in the hand-slap conviction of two underlings. An unexpected compliment came from a political insider who said, "You don't know how many political IOU's you caused to be called-in and created." My next level of complaint will be to the Congressional oversight committee chairs and members, the GAO, the press and the President. Then, litigation.
Once again, I am not a threat. I am not a Timothy McVeigh. I am a person, as stated in a previously communicated, needed by the VA more than I need the VA. I will prove this when every VA employee in the nation hates the Richmond VA for denying me my benefits because my company, Timism, will deny its benefits to all VA employees. (Review the website to see if you can conclude the unprecedented and unparalleled gift that every humanbeing wants.)
A lot of VA time and dime can be spared by re-instating my medication benefit of ten years and confirming I have emergency room rights. I am not interested in diagnosis and long-term care. I am especially not interested in my blood being drawn in the VA clinic where my memorialized, well-documented trail of travails began.
I hope I get an email at demcapu@comcast.net stating I can pickup a prescription of my anti-narcoleptic with telephone renewals.
With sincerity and certainty,
Robert S. Barnett (6096)
3600 Anne Street
Richmond, VA 23225
P.S. Once again--how many times, now--there is nothing you can learn about my narcolepsy that you do not know already from visits to primary care, the blood clinic and the sleep clinic. I think you are looking for the opportunity to formally say I don't have medication benefits to rubber-stamp the unilateral, summary revocation of my benefits.