Marianne Gutierrez: Health Practitioner: Benefits

Benefits - How do I afford to live? · 26 January 2006

How do I afford to live?
Benefits, the whole spectrum – income support, incapacity and disability living allowance, early retirement. I am ill, I have a diagnosed disease, I am entitled to benefits, it is what I paid my national insurance stamp for. It is what the national insurance premiums are for. If the government cannot find a cause or cure for M.E. then they will have to pay out the benefits until they can find out why so many thousands of their voting people are ill.
And the criteria for claiming benefits is that you cannot sustain actions/movement/activities for longer than 5 minutes in one day and only one day a week/fortnight/month and that you have impaired functionality, when you do activities/movements/actions ie: you have to do them with aids, chairs to lean on to bend down and pick yourself up again, sitting on stairs to get down them or on hands and knees to climb them, walking stick to steady walking and to help with standing in queues, wheelchair because you cannot walk/or cannot walk more than 100 paces, dishwasher because you cannot stand at the sink to wash dishes for more than 5 mins, using walls/bedside cabinet/bed/floor to get in or out of bed and then you have to lie down and rest for at least 2 hours if not longer when you have completed a 5 minute activity. And then the next day will be severely affected because of the activity the day before and the stiffness, pain, confusion and foggy thinking and inactivity may last between 2 days to a month.

However it may be beneficial to go along to your job centre to see if there is any work you can do that affords you little or no stress – such as computer work at home as and when you can manage it.

And lastly because we Christians always seem to leave to the last: God, trust God for your income and pray to Him, as He says: Aren’t the birds of the air fed and the lillies of the field clothed?

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I would be very interested to hear your comments: