Where to start. This is a post I really don't even want to make but it needs to be made. It's another Veterans Affairs post about the incompetence that is the VA. It makes me feel like I'm whining and only complaining when these issues are brought to the forefront.

After the past 10 days of dealing with Veterans Affairs again and the fiasco, it has been...I've decided I am going to start writing about this experience more frequently because I will be visiting them more frequently in the coming months and people need to understand the process Veterans go through for health care and compensation for service-related injuries.

It is timely, bureaucratic; requires patience and many highway miles.

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As I said above. Where to start. Let's start from the beginning.

It was the summer of 2006 I started seeing Veterans Affairs. I had been out of the military since March and home from Iraq for a little over a year. I was struggling with nightmares, anger, driving the road, sleeping, depression, alcoholism and a myriad of other ailments. So, I gave in and went to the VA.

The first diagnosis I ever received Veterans Affairs is a 10% rating for Chronic Adjustment Disorder and a 0% rating for a right-hand injury.

I was around 23 at the time. I didn't necessarily disagree with the rating but I was confused. If this was a 10 percent rating I couldn't even imagine what living life with more significant symptoms was like.

Then it was about 2008.

After a divorce and move to another state, I was finally in alcohol rehab. I was at a serious low. I was basically homeless and the only possession of value I owned was an almost decades old Ranger.

Everything that I reported to the VA in 2006 was still happening. It was during this time the VA had me hopped up on a lot of pills. I was taking an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, and a mood stabilizer. **I was seriously medicated and walked around like a soulless creature without a cause.

It was during this time I learned about the Cleveland VA and allegations of purposeful misdiagnosis of Veterans to save money. So I reapplied through a local Veterans Service Officer.

The guy seemed totally overwhelmed and I remember how stale it was in there. He reminded me of a postal worker going through the motions of a mundane job that he was waiting to retire from

The diagnosis stayed the same but the rating was increased through the Tennessee VA.

So now fast forward to 2012

I was still majorly struggling in life. I had wrecked my truck running from the "bad guys". Alcohol had crept into my life to self-medicate after finally obtaining employment as a machine washer at a chicken plant and abandoning the relief that marijuana brought to my symptoms. I had stopped taking the VA meds a long time ago. There was absolutely no way I could hold down life, much less a job sleeping 16 to 20 hours a day easily.

The struggle of maintaining a job and trying to hold a family together finally caught up with me. Eventually, I found myself going job to job and ending on some not so great terms with different employers.

It was during my trips to the Career Center to look for employment that I met the Veterans Representative. He was a vet himself and he noticed I had been in to see him a few times and started asking a few questions.

He immediately halted our meeting after talking for a few minutes about my life and called a lady on his phone. To this day I'm not sure who she was. I think she may have been a Veterans Service Officer, but I'm not sure.

He directed me to her office down the hall and so I went. She started asking about my VA claims history and what I had been going through in life. After about an hour she had a new claim prepared for me. It was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had... Walking into her office I had no idea this would be the end result.

I honestly didn't have faith anything would be accomplished from this visit. The person I met though seemed genuinely concerned and pissed while we spoke about the past 6-8 years of my life and the struggles that accompanied it.

This time I was being brought in front of a VA evaluator. I could be mistaken but I don't think before this time I had ever sat in front of someone to be actually evaluated. It wasn't in a medical office type setting. It was just an office at the Murfreesboro VA hospital with the explicit purpose of evaluating me for PTSD.

Before I knew it I had received a rating for PTSD at 70%.

It was like a miracle had happened. I went to look for a job at a local government-run Career Center to have a fellow vet take a special interest in me and listen...to walk away months later with a rating I could finally understand.

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This will be the end of Part 1 and it's a good place to stop. There is still more to the story and what I've written so far is a fairly basic description of around 6 years in dealing with the VA. The long lines, long drives, and learning the bureaucracy are also part of the challenge in dealing with the VA.

There are many stories of vets sharing their experiences related to those exact three issues and I urge you to do a cursory Google Search about those types of stories. They seem endless.

Most of my story relates to the misdiagnosis from the VA over the years. As I said before there will be a part 2 to the story. Then we will lead to part 3 which will focus on the here and now. Finally, I will continue to give updates on dealing with the VA because it will be happening way more frequently in the coming months.

I'll explain how we got to this new VA chapter but it'll be in Part 3...Stay tuned.

All pictures by @lexikon082



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