Caren, I am going to email you from work tomorrow AM. I thought I had the disk of SSA stuff here at home, but I cannot find it so it must be in a file of mine at work. I will email you too.
Just some pointers, on the first question you may also want to list: fatigue, inability to complete a solid nights sleep due to coughing attacks (this may not apply always, but should apply sometiems), (do you have hemytopsis??- coughing up blood, a signifigant amount-even occasionally. If so listing the amount and frequency is a MUST) (do you have digestive problems?? If you do have digestive problems, list you medications for digestion as well as how often you eat "every 2-3 hours"...and how many calories you try to get in a day).
Second question pointers: give some information about how often you coung (once or twice or three times an hour), do you have sever coughing attacks at all? If so, are the once a day, once an hour, twice a day?? If your insurance will pay for it, you should have a sleep study done. that will help with some questions for social Security about why you are fatigued so much during the day. Make sure they give you an in-depth sleep study where the measure your different realms of sleep and how long you stay in those realms, how often you come out of them (like coming out of REM because you coughed, and going to a previous level of sleep, but not completely waking up) and how often you completely wake up. It will also "measure" if you stop breathing at all during the night, for a signifigant amount of time. That cuts oxygen to the brain and can cause you memory problems, fatigue (as well as many other things) throughout the day. Even if you aren't completely waking up-as in Mark's case, he didn't have sleep Apnea- but it was still very relevant and I will tell you why breifly. Anytime you "jump" from a deeper realm of sleep (like REM) to a previous level of sleep (even if it is only just one) your body is disturbed and your sleep is disturbed as well. Mark only completely woke up 2-3 times, but he "jumped" from levels of sleep about 20 times that night and the doc reviewing the sleep study said tha much jumping backward is definately contributing to his fatigue. That will help your case as well because SSA doesn't understand, "I am just so tired" you have to give them tangible information.
I would recommend you print, or copy and paste to word; the recommendations that people give you. That way, if you can't access this post again (sometimes the search function is silly) you can still pull out a file and reference this stuff. and keep copies of everythign you send to SSA.
I will email you tomorrow
Julie
