Post Treatment Disability

I'm a member of BAYS, which is a Bay Area organization focused on providing support and resources for women undergoing cancer treatment. Recently, a thread was started around receiving post-treatment disability. Most us don't realize the prolonged effects that treatment can have on our systems and our lifestyles. Here's what one Legal-Aid lawyer told us about benefits:

"...In general, you can go on leave after treatment as long as your health care provider certifies that you need the leave due to your disability (e.g. to recover from the effects of treatment). There are different eligibility requirements for different kinds of leave/programs -- wage replacement (State Disability Insurance or private disability insurance) vs. job-protected leave from your employer (family/medical leave or leave as a reasonable accommodation) . As long as you're eligible, you should be able to receive both wage replacement and job protection during a medical leave after treatment."

Sleuthing a little further, I found out the Gov. Brown passed into a law a bill to allow workers to receive paid family leave benefits while caring for seriously ill grandparents, grandchildren, siblings, children and in-laws. The law will provide up to six weeks of partial wage replacement benefits per year. The law goes into effect July 2014. This falls on the heels of California's Paid Family Leave Law (PFL), which is the country's first law to provide partial pay to caregivers as they take time off to tend to ill family members or to bond with new children. 

Want to learn more? Here are a few links:
Fact Sheet for SB 770
SF Gate article on expanding leave 

The return of ice elevators

"They’re closing down on us. They’re closing down on us."

Bill rolled over this morning. What had I been dreaming about. Did I want to talk about it. I'd been calling out over and over last night.  I could remember that there was a dream. That I had dreamed. That dreams have returned to me. Layers and layers of iridescent, saturated moments, vague conversations, fractured and re-assembled memories floating through my nights again. I love to dream. I'm a lucid dreamer, exploring, retracing and re-jiggering a half dozen realities night after night, decade after decade. A favorite is to travel through interlaced ecosystems, by kayak or canoe, roller coaster, bicycle and ice elevator. I travel up and over rolling hillsides to an upper level ancient fortress city that doubles as its own museum, with floors made of dirt, marble, wood or snow, jumping over low walls and shoulder-less roads that drop me into a childhood backyard smelling faintly of the arid upper foothills of Los Angeles... I love that dream puzzle. Moving fluidly through these dreams is like being a kid and knowing the long, sneaky back-way home.

I'm dreaming again. This is what's important. Little bits of me are resurfacing. For the past five months I hadn't noticed that when I slept, that was that. Nothing more. 1 x 1 = 1. But now five weeks since the end of Carboplatin and Taxotere infusions, quiet layers of my past self are returning.

I smell different too. More like myself, what I used to be -- a little ripe, a little gamey. There'd always been a musky scent to me and now it's creeping back, replacing the mild, hangover-like stink that had been brought on by chemo-induced liver and kidney poisoning. My insides are filling with more of my own chemistry than what the pharmaceuticals decided I should be. The chemical alterations which have masked, numbed, distilled, and upset the ways I emit, emote, sense and perceive have been purged for the most part. I like the lightness of what remains or maybe, what has been returned. I like my human-ness. I never thought I'd love seeing my skin break out or delight in the scent of my clammy sweat. But it's all me. My insides finally free to do what they do best. What a sweet moment it is.