Author: cmarsh22

I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in the summer of 1985. Not long afterward I came down with spinal meningitis and was in a coma for 3 weeks. After emerging from the coma, my overall health began having serious complications. I developed severe, chronic asthma, which resulted in multiple hospitalizations every year until I was a teenager. At age 8, I developed severe clinical depression. It was so bad that at 8 years old, I didn't want to live anymore. I was also diagnosed with ADHD around the same time. My school thought that I was possibly developmentally disabled, as I never did any of my school work and spent my days daydreaming. So, they began testing me extensively. One of the tests they gave me was the official IQ test. The results were the opposite of what my teachers had expected. At 8 years old, I was reading at a 12th-grade level and had an IQ of 137. It turned out that I wasn't ignoring my schoolwork because I was struggling. I was ignoring it because to me, it was just busy work. I preferred to spend my time contemplating life's biggest questions, such as the origins of the universe, and the meaning of life rather than spending hours on end working on things that I already knew and understood. Needless to say, this resulted in me dropping out of school in my junior year. I did get my GED the following year and scored in the top 10% in all subjects but math (where I scored in the top 15%) At 17, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Which is probably the WORST age to get such a diagnosis. Diabetes requires a drastic life change. Doctors and my parents drilled it into my head that I could NOT eat sweets anymore. Well, as is with most 17-year-olds, I was in the "you can't tell me what to do. I'm gonna do the opposite instead," stage. It wasn't that I thought I was "invincible" like most teens do, my attitude was more in line with "meh, diabetic complications won't really hit me till later in my life, I'll deal with it then." Well, by the end of 2015, it was officially "later in my life." Between my complete disregard for a diabetic diet, the fact that I was kicked off my parent's insurance at 19 years old and, no matter what I tried, I couldn't get adequate health insurance from either private companies nor state ran Medicaid. Up until 2018, the state of Utah had a policy that to qualify for Medicaid, you either had to have children or be approved for Social Security Disability. At age 19, after the first time I was denied Medicaid, I told the state that I wasn't going to go get someone knocked up just so I could get health insurance and I also told them that if they didn't help me with Medicaid, my health would deteriorate so badly and so rapidly, that I'll have no choice but to eventually go on disability, at which point they would have to pay me to do nothing. Rather than helping me to remain a happy, healthy, CONTRIBUTING member of society, they chose to let me wither away. And wither away I did. Not having health insurance meant I could ONLY afford one of my two insulins each month. It meant I had to ration the insulin I did have. (Which is potentially deadly,) it meant I couldn't even check my blood sugar for months on end. How I survived is a miracle. So, as I said, by 2015 the diabetic complications, in addition to my asthma, depression, anxiety, and PTSD, I could no longer maintain employment. I would have to call in AT LEAST once a week (usually 2-3 days a week.) I was unable to make enough to pay rent or even to buy food. I had to accept the inevitable, so, at 30 years old, I had no other choice but to apply for SSDI. I quickly found myself homeless and living on the streets. To make matters worse, I was having some new, very serious, and very unpleasant health problems. But, with no insurance, I couldn't afford to see the specialist that my doctor told me I needed to see. Things became so bad that I spent A LOT of time legitimately pondering whether or not I was actually dead and that what I was experiencing was, in fact, Hell. Near the end of 2016, I found out that I had completely lost my disability claim. We had appealed it as far as we could but kept getting told that they didn't have enough medical evidence to qualify for disability. It wasn't that my health problems didn't qualify. It was the fact that they didn't have enough medical records to approve me. They didn't have enough records because I could rarely afford to go to the doctor. At the beginning of 2017, my doctor told me that if I couldn't find a way to get health insurance, he doubted I'd still be alive by the following year. So I began working my butt off to try and find insurance. The only option I seemed to have was to move to a state that wouldn't refuse a type 1 diabetic Medicaid. That, mixed with the scenery and climate, I decided to move to Washington State. I sold as much of my belongings as I could, packed what I had left in a backpack and a suitcase, then left my home state of Utah, happily I might add and found myself living on the streets of Seattle. I was SO happy to be there, though, cuz for the first time in more than a decade, I had medical insurance. I eventually had to apply for Social Security again, as it was a requirement for Washington's cash assistance program. I reapplied, thinking I was gonna be denied again, for sure. But, low and behold, not even 3 months later I got a phone call telling me I had been approved. For the first time since I was young, I felt like I could breathe a little bit. I spent the next 3 years working on trying to get my physical and mental health back under control. By the 4th year (2021) I was about as stabilized, healthwise, as I was gonna get. So I reached out to the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to see if they could help me to get the training needed to reenter the workforce in a field I could work, despite my health problems. We worked together over the next 7 months to research my options, create a plan, get it approved, and get me enrolled at Washington State University (Vancouver Campus) in the DTC program as a non-degree student. My goal is to get the "Video Game Design Certification" because I would love to design games. But I am quickly finding that the skills I'll learn on my journey to that specific certification, will open the doors to MANY industries. I'm in my first semester and I'm loving it. I'm so happy to have a 2nd chance at being able to contribute to society. I