Something I've been wondering....

[conuly]

How, exactly, does financial aid work? Do they just say "this is what you can pay, and we'll pay any amount more than that"? Or do they go "this is how much you get, no more"? Or what, exactly?

Edit: See, even though I fill out my FAFSA every year, I have no idea how it works.

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not the blindness. Blindness is annoying, but it's a minor thing. People always overestimate it.

I've got about 40 or so things wrong with me, so I can't really list them all. But the main ones are massive fatigue and weakness. I need about 11 hours of sleep per day. On bad days or if I don't get enough rest, I start to not get enough air into my systerm and need to lie down or else I can collapse. My limbs are weak. I can't support my own weight for too long. I can't lift or carry much. If I'm not careful, things pull and that's really bad.

I have good days and bad days. On good days, I can be productive... on bad days, I can't do much of anything. I can't predict which days will be good or not. Before I went blind, I was working as a substitute teacher, because I could pick the days on which I worked. But I can't do that with the blindness. Plus, I think some of the other issues have gotten worse since then.

My concentration and ability to think clearly comes and goes. I can do work, but only if there's no real schedule to it. I need to be able to focus on my good times. And what makes it worse is, if I need to go anywhere, I'll arrive in worse shape. So, I can do LiveJournal stuff since it's when I can and at my own desk. But if I needed to travel somewhere, I'd arrive out of sorts. I get intermittent vertigo, which seems to make me more likely to get car sick. Plus I'm more sensitive to pressure changes. This means BARTing to San Francisco is painful (you have to go through a tunnel, and the pressure change is a problem for me).

And just to make it all more fun, I get migraines. I'm more likely to get them if I don't get enough sleep or if I'm stressed or if I physically over exert myself.

This means I just cannot keep any sort of reliable schedule. I often have to cancel things I plan in advance. I'm not really comfortable scheduling anything as a thing to do in the future. I can mostly pull this off if I rest for several days in advance of the event. But that's useless for recurring demands. Plus, if I do something like go out to BART and then see a movie (to give you an idea of level of exertion), I will generally need to spend the next two days recovering.

So, I haven't managed to figure out any job that I could have any chance at. And I can't be a technical writer any more. Those parts of my brain don't function the way they used to. A lot of my brain functions differently than it used to, which means I'm still adjusting and learning. I seem to have acquired many ADD/auti-like symptoms, which makes pretty much no sense. I didn't think things like that ~could~ be acquired. And yet... I have a strong sensitivity to various stimuli I used to be able to tune out. I get overwhelmed easily when out in public. I shut down sometimes. And worse, it's recent, so I haven't spent a lifetime learning to compensate.

[conuly]

Oy vey. *hugs*

[leora.livejournal.com]

:) I like to think of myself as surprisingly able for a disabled person. They have little scales of disability, and I fall pretty far down on them, as I can't always care for my basic needs (which is why my lothario needs to assist me on a regular basis). Yet, I've done a whole lot on LiveJournal that I'm very proud of. But it makes for a very bizarre feeling. On LiveJournal I am respected and generally viewed as competent. Outside LiveJournal, I am generally viewed as highly disabled. And I usually come across as scatterbrained or stupid because I have problems understanding spoken speech, and I sometimes forget how to speak clearly. Out loud, words will get lost, forgotten, or twisted. For some reason, I can still type fluently. It seems to use a different pathway.

So, it's nice to have a place where people see my abilities. Most of the time I'm viewed as fairly useless. And I know that a lot of my doctors view me that way. Too disabled to be of any value. It's part of why I hate interacting with them.

[conuly]

*laughs*

I almost wish I had your problem. ALMOST. Instead, I have people who don't know me very well (or at all) trying to tell me that I'm "just fine, perfectly normal" while all the time I'm screaming at them inside my head.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Oh, I get that too. Lots of people think I'm lazy, malingering, or just weird. None of my disabilities are visible. Many of them aren't even visible to doctors. That's part of why they view me so poorly. I look like a fairly healthy, albeit poorly sighted, girl who for some reason keeps complaining of being highly disabled and in lots of pain. But I look so healthy...

They speech problems are a serious issue. They don't tend to understand that I can't understand what they say well, and that I can't communicate with speech well. And even if I try to explain it, people just don't get it. But then, every time I go to the hospital somebody either hands me written paperwork and says, "here, you can read this." (uh thanks, but no, I can't) or tries to direct me with hand-waving. I have the big white reflective stick with red bit at the bottom. If they can't even understand being blind means you have trouble seeing, then I doubt I can explain totally invisible disabilities. Some days I wonder if I'm really the blind one.