When I was young I lived in a commune of sorts, with artists and hippies* and what not. Every few weeks a couple of us did just that, because why wouldn’t we?
Also later when I worked in a group home for elderly autistic people in all shapes and sizes that experience came in handy as I was used to the smell. Usually I ended up doing the shittiest (harhar) cleaning duties and it never really bothered me even though we were supposed to rotate. One of the nurses with over a decade of experience refused to even enter a room while I was emptying the stomach contents of one particularly tricky patient (he essentially had plugs straight into his stomach for both in and output, they definitely generated some interesting smells).
Sure, I got paid for the latter half, but I still did that stuff daily for years.
Later when I became a father there was absolutely nothing that could faze me anymore. Sort of glad I got to experience all that, weirdly enough. I even miss that job sometimes, felt like I at least did something meaningful.
The problem with that is there are doctors with individual opinions gatekeeping that welfare. One might think you’re disabled, while another might think you can get better. I’ve been stuck in just that kind of limbo for almost a decade. I’m required to look for a job each month that everyone involved knows I could never do, and so I have to live on the bare minimum until I reach some arbitrary threshold to get the pension I should’ve gotten a long time ago.
Meanwhile my family suffers, I have to spend what little I get on the medicine keeping me breathing and when I finally get it I’ll be too far gone to have any time left.
All this because I happened to get a disease rare enough that there are no experts and it just so happens to interact with the asthma I already had in unpredictable ways.
So tell me, who should decide who’s disabled and who isn’t?