In this special section of the Forum page of VFJ, veterans can now come to the internet microphone and expose the VA Agency and all of it's hidden and secret systems of cruel and inhumane treatment of hospital patients through it's bungling, dysfunctional, malpracticed, and lazy legal or administrative systems to show what this agency is REALLY about and why there are so many of us walking around with the same story of murder and premature deaths as we know it to be at the hands of the VA.

This will be a wake up call to those other Veterans who are delusional types who just don't get it about the chamber of horrors that the VA really has become, and for public eyes to perhaps, finally become acquainted with first-hand accounts of who the VA and
it's Hitleresque directors really are. It's a time for all of us Veterans to overpower and defeat the nonstop propaganda that is falsely, deceitfully, and perpetratedly put out on a daily basis by the VA "publishing company" it has become via it's vast expanses of magazines which none of us want, and website destinations which none of use.

It seems only fitting that I start off this Forum with my own revelation of horror as I have lived it and try to continue struggling to put it out of my memory.

Many people don't know and are unaware of that the national Food Stamp program is overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Food Stamp program is often bundled with Welfare Services but can also stand alone as a single benefit program to those who are income qualified.

While some people might sing the praises of the Food Stamp program, the stunning truth is that when the program is applied to the military veteran medical patient inside the VA system, this very same program becomes a weapon of human torture and the sick and suffering medical patient is left to fend on his or her own to fight themselves out of the bureacratic rathole which it eventually evolves into.

In 1991 I was stricken with a 100% obstruction in my gastrointestinal track caused by pcb exposure at Fort McClellan, Alabama, after the VA Hospitals had locked me out of the facilities for YEARS for no other reason than I my gender. In Alabama, women troops were
denied access to VAMC treatment. By the time I was allowed in, I went from Doc to Doc and everyone was misdiagnosing my gastrointestinal problems. This went on from my Army service in 1971 all the way into 1991, and culminated into high drama where I found myself laying near death in a VA hospital bed with this new development of a full obstruction. I had consistently suffered with recurring gastrointestinal disease for 20 years right under the noses of VA docs.

I spent 2 months in VAMC Critical Care, the first month just to get "well enough" so that I could survive the surgery that I was about to face. Having gone into a full G.I. Bleed, with more tubes coming out of me than an I-95 overpass, and no way to eat food other than
an elaborate hose-hookup surgically implanted into my stomach, the picture was not pretty at age 41 as I started going into the full-body bloat that comes with knocking at deaths door.

I had a life-threatening surgery to remove the
obstruction which, for those of you who like to match to VA Codes, is 38 CFR Part 4, Diagnostic Code 7348 which is called a Truncal Vagotomy with Pyloroplasty and in my case was coupled with a full upper body exploratory. This surgery is one of high drama because
it is on the scale of an autopsy, taking up your entire upper torso. The surgical line is cut starting at your bra-line and going well below your bikini-line and it cuts through all of your chest muscles that you use in daily function to boot. The entire surgery leaves
behind a resulting and secondary medical condition called Postgastrectomy Syndrome
which is described at 38 CFR Part 4.111 and Part 4, Diagnostic Code 7308.

There are so many miles of tubing and IV's attached to you in the end, that it required me plus 2 VA nurses to begin my trek up and down the halls for recovery, as it took that many hands to hold everything while I walked.

When the tubing is finally removed as I was about to go home, my body experienced major problems dealing with blood sugar levels and processing carbohydrates. Diabetics may also be able to identify with the unpredictable and sudden fluxes in blood sugar up and downs which are common to postgastrectomy patients.

The return to eating regular food is long, drawn out, and scary. In the first few post-hospital weeks after patient discharge, your bodys electrolytes are totally screwed up. I was given a requirement to drink a baby formula purchased at the pharmacy store called
PediaCare. Bottles upon bottles of this stuff were needed to keep myself hydrated. Fresh fruit and vegetables were also required with no breads, no coffee or tea, and so on. You get the picture.

Mobility was another issue. It's not until your
chest muscles are cut that you come to understand how much you use them when you stand up or sit down from a chair or bed. Driving a car right away is rather hard. To go from a lying position to sitting upright on the edge of your bed, you first have to use your feet to push towards the edge of the bed, and then use your arms and hands to pull yourself up into the upright sitting position. To go from sitting to standing, you get your feet
under you first then push upward with your
hands from a table or doorway to fully stand. This gets old really fast on any given day.

I came sliding out of VA Critical Care on my back and straight into emergency welfare assistance which by itself was cruel, unforgiving, and could have cared less that I was a surgical patient. In case you didn't
know it, the Department of Social Services all
but ignores the existance of the VA agency and it's veterans population. While Social Security assistance counselors are available at the Welfare Office to assist the elderly with applying for SSD benefits, there are no qualified and competent VA counselors of any type at the Welfare Office to become the safety net for patients like me.

Additionally, there are no Social Workers at the VAMC who give aid or assistance to newly discharged surgical patients for navigating the Welfare Office. I was turned away at every effort for help.

The Welfare Office has one singular agency mission from the time that you, the veteran surgical patient, arrives at their doorstep --- and that is to get you pushed, driven, harrassed, hounded, pestered, threatened,
and relentlessly "appointmented" until you are finally moved out under somebody else's program. They don't really care which program, it can be any program as long as it isn't THEIRS. The favorites which they like to push towards is VA disability or Social Security disability.

I was given a monthly cash allotment of $350
and $90 a month in food stamps. You do the math. I had a mortgage, a car, a string of credit card bills, utilities, phone, and I was now nearly 50 lbs. underweight and needed new clothes.

It took me all of 2 weeks to soon figure out that my food and drink needs were more on the scale of $300.00 a month instead of the allotted $90/mo. in order to keep up with what the VA doctors were telling me to do to facilitate my recovery. The PediaCare alone
was running me into a money rathole and I needed for that to be covered by my Food
Stamps.

I filed an appeal at DSS to overturn my food stamp allotment, based on the legal argument that I was a post-surgical patient with special food and drink needs. To my horror I was coldly advised by the adjudicator that the Agriculture Department made no consideration whatsoever to the medical patient status of surgical victims with specal food and drink needs, and I could not receive any increase in my food stamps. The stamps are issued by a fixed computation table, without regard to medical needs, based on number of persons in the family. That is IT !!

For the next weeks and months, I was stalked, hounded, harrassed by DSS caseworkers to begin moving my case into a different program, and all of this harrassment was packaged in a relentless letter mailed to me which always ended with the threat that my lousy
$90 in food stamps would be shut off if I did not continuously leave a trail of verification that I was pursuing my transition either into VA or SSD disability.

For the entire year, I lived on potatos, carrots, broccoli, and cabbage doing my best to make recipes from the same staples time and time again day in and day out. More often than not, I did without the PediaCare and suffered with overheating, dizziness, and the ongoing near faintlike feeling that comes with blood sugar fluxes and lack of hydration. It was dangerous for me to even leave my home because of the weakened state that you are in from inadequacy.

The VA Regional Office, took nearly 2 years to even process my papers and then denied everything for SCC status for no apparent reason in 1993. The denials were glib and uncaring. My Army Hospital records were nowhere to be included on the Evidence List that was
used to adjudicate the claim.

Then came SSD, who for the first round tried to deny me flat out, citing that I could get VA benefits instead. Great --- this is all I need as an interagency finger pointing contest in the middle of my surgery recovery!

Between the 2 agencies of VA and Social Security, and the Welfare Office on my back of daily threatening me to take my only lifeline to food, I was forced to leave my recovery bed and do a daily trek to the public library to become a sickbed-lawyer and learn how to do
SSD and VA claims. Hours in a sitting position to read VA law books, then hours sitting at a computer to draft pleadings first for one federal agency and then the other, followed by a trip to xeroxing to copy the piles, and then priority mail to tell the assholes to HURRY -- I'm dying here !! Did I happen to leave out
that this all bled out my lousy $350 that I was trying to live on ???

To this day I refer to the ordeal of the sickbed trek to do forced agency lawyering as the Library Death March From Hell. Consider the fact that surgical staples holding my entire upper chest together had just recently been removed. The tubeholes into my stomach were still stitched together.

I eventually got my SSD with no attorney.
There wasn't a single lawyer across the 3-city area of this part of the state who would come and take my case and help me out. Phone calls were not answered, nor were faxes or letters. It was do-it-yourself as I drove across town to the Social Security Office and then waited an hour for my turn to go into the Hearing Room.

To this day I am still up on appeal time and time again trying to release my VA benefits. I often wonder how many other veterans have died for not being as strong enough or to have the literacy bearings to survive what this 3-agency Gang Bang does to gastrointestinal patients coming out of the Critical Care ward with life threatening post-op needs.

To this day, I still spend $300 a month on food and drink to support my special diet. When I go to sleep at night, I can still see myself bursting into tears at the Welfare Office begging for more food stamps so that I could live long enough to recover from my VA surgery. The VA surgeon had written a letter estimating my recovery would take a year, and the Welfare Office kept telling me that they were not going to wait no year for me to get off their program.

The VA will tell the public about how much they
care about their veterans, but I am here to tell you today that they are not only as dumb as the day is long about the cruelties and realities of what they put us through, but they are also the biggest Whiner's Club of excuses you would ever want to meet as to why they don't have Welfare Office Social Workers to
aid and assist newly discharged surgical patients who are coming out of Critical Care.

I desperately needed a licensed attorney to help me after I got home. Lawyers for veterans are Missing-In-Action here in Albany. The Bar Association won't give us any, and none of them practice VA law anyway. There is noone to call here to help.

I never recovered from my surgery and was able to return to work. I will always believe that the cruelties of the agencies facilitated my final doom into eternal disability at the age of 41. At age 55 now, my fight continues with the VA and there is no end in sight. I still
have no lawyer. One can argue as to whether or not the agencies made me well, or the agencies made me disabled. It's hard to know where one ends and the other one begins.

You might call it "assistance". I call it "Torture".