Worthless Goddamn Cripple

Read Part 1
The final paragraph of the rejection letter I received informed me that if I didn’t agree with the decision, I had a right to appeal. The dentist who’d sent the request had cautioned that infection might set in if I left the damaged section unrepaired. I phoned some agency—probably the Department of Human Services—and scheduled an appeal. I expected a committee of several stern people, sitting erect behind a huge bench that dwarfed me as I stated my case, my tiny voice ricocheting off the walls of the cavernous chamber. Instead I met with a lone condescending dumbass in his modest office.

A cripplevan lugged me downtown, to the nondescript government building where I‘d scheduled my meeting with a public aid stooge. I checked in with one of several receptionists; she immediately led me down a long hall past file cabinets, copy machines, and plastic plants, to the public aid stooge’s office. more »

I lost the incisors abutting either side of my two front teeth in a 1978 car accident—like a tornado destroys selected buildings while leaving others unscathed. After a dentist glued a porcelain 6-unit bridge onto my upper front row of teeth, he warned that sections of it might shatter somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade hence. He was right. I woke from the coma and discovered that something had chipped the unit he’d sculpted to appear as my left incisor, exposing a rough blackish-gray foundation.

The wanton bungling of medical personnel subjected me to public aid dental care policies that made about as much sense as tits on a boxcar. more »