I'm on SSDI and have been for 3 years. I was an occupational therapist for 11 years before that. I fought to work as hard as I could. Vocational rehab said they couldn't help me and I needed to go on disability in 2007 and I made it 4 more years. In that time I was fired twice (once more due to seniority and the company had a history of firing expensive senior therapists for new grads than anything else) and then had 2 great jobs, one of which led to the other as it was a contract job that I turned permanent. My therapist says I was running out of ability to work for about a year. I was totally unaware of that and not sure I agree. I do know that in April of the last year Medicare started something that pretty much doubled my paperwork and made life much more difficult. That would have caught up with me. I went off work for a gyn procedure expecting to be back in 4-6 weeks. Something happened with anesthesia and I lost cognition and didn't get it back so I never made it back.

It's the biggest loss life has dealt me so far.