12:34pm July 29, 2014

“I’m one of those cripples with a care plan, which places me more among the unliberated cripples than not. I’ve been required to have a care plan pretty much my whole life. First it was because I was an inmate in a state-operated boarding school for cripples. Now it’s because the state pays the wages of my pit crew, which is what I call the guys who get me dressed, put me on the crapper, etc. Thus, I am required to have a care plan. Except in this case it’s called a service plan. My service plan allots me X number of hours per month for getting dressed and X number of hours per month for taking a leak and so on. It does not allot me any hours for getting blotto drug and waking up in a tattoo parlor in Reno or for trying to get laid.”

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A Cripple with a Care Plan (via disabilityhistory)

I’ve got two care plans. One from the DD agency, one from the agency that provides LNAs for personal care. The DD one actually probably would allow getting laid as a goal, although it probably wouldn’t word it like that. The VNA one absolutely wouldn’t. But I hate them. I really hate them. I resent people who come into my home and try to ask me what my goals in life are so they can put them in a fucking file somewhere. I know that the “what are your goals in life?” thing is supposed to be all progressive and crap, but in practice it feels like being asked to tell the state my innermost feelings, and I don’t want to do that. Consequently I rarely participate much in the production of my ISA (what the DD agency calls a care plan – the VNA just calls it a care plan) because I can’t handle the whole thing where I’m supposed to put my soul in a file for the state. Plus I don’t think of my life in terms of goals, never have, never will. That’s gotten me in trouble before, the case manager from hell (my first ever case manager, too) once wrote something like “the client refuses to tell any goals because she claims her brain doesn’t work that way”. Then she just made up a bunch of goals for me, and… well she actually pretty much fabricated the entire IPP out of thin air.

Anyway, I have only had care plans as an adult, not as a child, but I’ve had them my entire adult life and at this point I don’t even remember what it was like before I had them. There’s so much of my life where I’m used to bureaucratic BS that I don’t even know what a ‘normal’ life would look like without all that.