more thinking about it*

In the previous entry I mentioned the loss of "visual memory" or the damage to it from the car wreck in 1998. I think that’s why I scraped the side of my bus three times (the last time I hit a parked car – just one more inch of clearance and I wouldn’t have).

I quit/was fired after that – they were going to fire me anyway, but I asked them to, because I wasn’t a good bus driver. I had some incidents with the school buses too – no kids were on board (except when that woman made a left out of a driveway directly into the side of my bus – "I didn’t see you!" she said). I looked at things for turns and didn’t understand what I was seeing, I think, because the scrapes were surprises to me (and not good ones).

Most of the time, in daily life, well, that not understanding thing is not that big a deal, most of the time, but driving big vehicles you have to understand what you’re seeing and what it means all the time.

Since that last thing happened after ten or eleven hours of work (and the whole day was more than 14 hours), it was further evidence to me that I can’t really work full time – things get a little weird after half a day.

I know from experience that filing for SSD takes forever, that they pretty much wait for you to give up or die, but I’m thinking that I should reapply. I did get one year’s worth of disability in 1999, but the damage did not really repair itself; I just learned to work around it. That’s not good for any kind of long day’s driving job; especially not with passengers.

My former wife advised me not to get any kind of job that may put other people at risk. I was proud – too proud, it looks like – to admit to any disability, and for 13 years, I’ve tried to work around these disabilities, but I’ve been fired from 3 driving jobs and have lost two more in the intervening years, and it seems clear to me now that there are problems, and that if they aren’t gone in a dozen years, I should just admit to myself that I am not as capable as I was before the wreck and the TBI. ( severe Traumatic Brain Injury)

I never wanted to be disabled, but… I guess maybe I am. There’s been some emotional issues too, brought out lately in force because of my cat’s death (those last four days were pretty horrible, although as time goes by I forget more).

Sigh.

Maybe surviving the wreck is not as good a thing as I thought.*

I mean, maybe it didn’t work out as well as I thought.

But, onwards, as someone reminded me 😉

*****