Esmé Weijun Wang’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Disability insurance companies often employ tactics such as monitoring social media and sending private investigators to follow claimants. Innumerable claimants who suffer from “invisible” disabilities such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) are observed and discounted due to these processes.
CASE
Claim No. ER-123456KR Ms. E. Wang
Client Insured: Lymetown National Insurance
Place: San Francisco, CA
Claimant: E. Wang
Investigator: JD
Report Date: September 24, 2015
SYNOPSIS
This woman is clearly not disabled, but I followed her around anyway just to make sure. Because I am very thorough at my job, and because that is why you pay me the big bucks.
It was confirmed that Wang resides at 123 ***** St., San Francisco, CA. She does not appear to drive. Wang was seen walking to several neighborhood locations, including a frou-frou “boutique market” that sells, among other things, expensive sardines, as if anyone would actually want to eat sardines, let alone expensive ones.
And by “several” locations I actually mean two locations, but Wang exhibited no signs of pain or movement restrictions while locomoting to either location. She used no cane, wheelchair, or walker. She looked normal. In fact, she looked pretty good. Several times I wanted to tell her that her tight pants were very appealing, but then I remembered that I am a paid spy.
REPORT OF SURVEILLANCE
Pursuant to Lymetown National Insurance request, I commenced surveillance of E. Wang, 123 ***** St., San Francisco, CA, to determine her current activities due to her claim of disability stemming from Lyme Disease and fibromyalgia. (That in itself should render the claim void, should it not? I read a few articles online that indicate that these so-called illnesses don’t exist. I am not arguing with Lymetown Insurance Company about this matter, because again, I am receiving the big bucks to follow people, but should the client wish to read the articles I mentioned, I can go through my browser history and attach some links.)
September 21, 2015
6 AM
Investigator arrived in the vicinity of 123 ***** St., San Francisco, CA to commence surveillance of subject E. Wang.
The Wang residence was in well-maintained condition. The front windows were shielded by white curtains, and displayed a window box full of what may have been flowers at some point. I thought that they were dead flowers, but they could also be some form of exotic succulent; I do not know much about botany.
Surveillance afforded an excellent view of the front of Wang’s residence.
10:30 AM
An individual, described as:
Female/Asian, age 30-35, 5 ft. 6, 120 lbs, slender, light complexion, short platinum hair, believed to be E. Wang, and hereafter referred to as the subject, exited the house from the front door and walked down five steps to the sidewalk.
She then walked across the street to the aforementioned “boutique market.”
Investigator’s Note:
The subject did not seem to be hampered physically in any way. For example, she did not grimace or wince a single time while under observation. She was observed in the boutique market looking at the expensive sardines, despite ample data that indicates the disabled population only eats the bare minimum to stay alive, due to living an inevitably miserable existence.
Observation indicated that the subject was seen laughing and smiling while conversing with the employee who rang up the subject’s latte.
No grimacing or hobbled movement was noted.
2:30 PM
Because the subject had not emerged again, and because I was admittedly bored from sitting in a car for eight or so hours, I checked the subject’s Instagram account. I observed two Instagram updates (11:52 AM, 1:33 PM) of the subject lying in bed, which smacks of laziness. I mean, geez—I’d like to lounge around, too, but it’s important for me to do work that really means something.
4:30 PM
The subject did not exit the house again until this time. Subject emerged from the residence with a small brown dog.
She again walked down the five steps, again without grimacing or hobbling, and spoke some sweet words to her dog before walking down the sidewalk to the corner. Those sweet, sweet words are not documented here because I was so moved by them that I cried a little before continuing to observe the subject.
The dog defecated beside a tree. Subject removed a bag from her pocket, bent down, and picked up the feces with the bag. I found this somewhat disgusting, but dutifully watched the entire event from start to finish in case the subject did something else that would indicate her lack of disability, such as expressing that she has a nice life or running a marathon.
Subject returned to her residence with the dog and the bag of feces (gross).
6 PM
Surveillance was discontinued.
CONCLUSION
This concludes the work authorized by Lymetown Insurance Company. Should the client desire, we can further document Wang’s activities. I would, in fact, be more than happy to do so, because I like following women.
As I’ve said before, the subject did not seem to be hampered physically in any way. Also, she looked normal.
There was no indication that the claimant’s so-called “illnesses” constitute disability, as I was not able to witness symptoms of fatigue, joint pain, chills, uncontrollable sweating, low-grade fever, muscle pain, headache, or stiff neck.
Finally, I was not inspired by anything she did, which is, I am given to understand, the whole point of disabled people.
“Finally, I was not inspired by anything she did, which is, I am given to understand, the whole point of disabled people.”
As a disabled person, I am told frequently that I am inspirational, so much so , in fact, that now when I leave the house I ask my husband, “Do I look inspirational ENOUGH?”
Of all the reasons to find you inspiring, your disability is pretty far down my list.
Let’s Talk About How Socially Inacceptable It Is To Admit Pain And How People Discount It Even When You Tell Them That You Can’t/Shouldn’t Walk Today
YES. I have kvetched about this in various places on the Internet, probably here too; I have a bad back, feet, and knee that I can’t afford to fix, and also a huge, fast, agile, sensory-processing-disordered two-year-old who loves running more than anything else. The vast majority of playgrounds in Toronto are open-space. I take him to a playground and he sprints in ever-widening circles AROUND the playground before taking off for the outskirts and trying to touch all the broken glass and empty yogurt containers and animal feces and whatnot. I decided that I’m not going to do it again until my pain issues or his running issues are resolved (he’s in a special daycare and it’s helping), but many of my mom friends, when we’re planning to get together, are all, “pleeease Siniichulok, PLEEASE can we go to the playground?? [Kid] loves it so much! I already promised him!” When we go, I chase my kid and can barely walk afterwards for a few days (and I NEED to be able to walk fast with this dude), and everyone else stands in a circle and chats while their toddlers play placidly in the dirt near them, and they look at me quizzically while I get sweatier and sweatier and run around limping and cursing. When I tell them that my back/feet/knee are acting up and I can’t chase my kid that day but I can meet them elsewhere, they STILL try to bait-and-switch, reminding me that it’s Important for kids to be outdoors. When I’ve told non-special-needs-knowledgeable ECEs about my pain issues, they respond that it’s important to “meet your child’s energy needs” and “push through challenges” and “go that extra mile.” When I have a child who’s more energetic than most children, and I’m even *less* equipped than most adults to be able to meet those needs. Now I just use their boundary-pushing as a vehicle for weeding out people I’d rather not hang out with, but it took some time to work through the guilt and massive irritation.
I work in a job where I sometimes have to read surveillance reports, and this is 100% correct (and also a big part of the reason why I am quitting said job). The system is so broken.
This is my job. Actively. Right now. Not the investigator, but the poor sod who has to type up the notes into something resembling sense at the end of the day.
One of the investigators and I have a running joke about how many ways he can say ‘dogs pooping’ without actually saying ‘dogs pooping’. Thus far, we’ve got “disturbing the dew”, “mudsliding the anthills”, and “feces fiesta”.
This is probably the only part of the job that doesn’t make you lose faith in humanity, though.
When I have pipe dreams of being a PI it’s like a Veronica Mars style PI….Mars Investigations would never be such assholes as this!
Vinnie Van Lowe, on the other hand…..
I remember asking a PI acquaintance a million questions about her job because I was young and into reading ALL the detective novels.
She had big hair which I, naturally, took to be full of secrets, and drank whiskey.
My takeaway, her job was by turns boring and infuriating and made her wildly misanthropic.
In fairness, she loathed insurance jobs except for the ones where some idiot took off his neck brace, stowed his crutches in his trunk and played soccer with his mates for hours. Those just added to the misanthropy, but were guilt-free.
She also despised “Is my spouse cheating?” cases because (a) Inevitably they were and (b) the client generally was unhappy with having their denial bubble burst.
I asked her why she kept doing it, and the answer was a shrug and “Money’s good”.
On one hand, any romantic notions of detectiving I had went out the window; on the other, I always thought she’d have made an awesome modern-noir heroine.
PRO TIP: If you’re disabled in any way, make sure to always leave the house with the following:
– a wheelchair
– a walker
– a cane
– a big duffle bag marked “PILLS”
– a doctor’s note
– large sunglasses
– a pillow and/or foldable seating
– a journal titled “MY DISABILITY”
Then there can be no confusion!
My husband with fibro doesn’t always need to use his cane, but we make sure that he has it when he goes to the airport regardless of his walking ability that day. Otherwise, no one believes us when we say that he can’t remain standing for too long and needs extra time to board.
Fibro person here–I wear my wrist brace for similar reasons–it makes me feel safer in transit/asking for help/being slow. (It also helps motion-related pain in trains, cars, etc.)
Although I still almost cry thinking about the guy yelling at me for being “too aggressive” and rude in trying to slip round his ambling to get the precious single-seat-with-my-bad-arm-against-the-wall-side for my (then) 50 minute train ride home.
I’m a part time wheelchair user, as are many people, and whenever I’m out with the walking stick instead, which is usually to get me to a taxi y the door but occasionally I manage a walk, I am terrified that someone will report me for not using the wheelchair and I will lose my welfare benefits (i.e. entire income) and possibly end up in the press.
You are more likely to be believed when you are using a mobility aid, but you are also stared at much more, treated worse, and more likely to be subjected to hate crime, in my experience. Which includes assault, and someone deliberately stopping about an inch short of running us over while yelling, “I’ll put you in a wheelchair!” to my partner, and plenty of verbal abuse, including from medical staff.
Right. In. The. Feelz.
If my husband does what he needs to manage his fibro pain, then he doesn’t “seem disabled”, but if he doesn’t for some reason (like, say, fatigue), then he’s “unmotivated to help himself”. Bonus ableism points for when people say “I don’t think of him as disabled.” Yep, you not thinking of him as disabled magically makes our lives unaffected by disability, thanks!
“I don’t think of you as disabled.” THE WORST. I also find that the people who say stuff like that are the ones who are most likely to forget to take my disability into account when I’ve expressly spelled out my limitations in the past.
Bingo. That point was driven home for me the other weekend when I fixed my husband a plate at the buffet line at a family event, and my cousin asked why someone like me (mouthy feminist who works while my husband is the homemaker) would fix a plate for him while he remained seated, and why didn’t he fix me a plate. I said he was tired, and she started mocking the idea of him being tired so early in the evening. I glared at her, but she still didn’t get it, then I said “He’s disabled, remember?” She started spluttering on about how she didn’t think of him as disabled.
Had to get that off my chest. It’s so obnoxious.
Ugh, sorry you had to deal with that. Is it really so hard for these people to say “oh, sorry, I forgot”? It is better to remember, or to not comment at all on things that don’t affect you, but if you can’t manage those things do not try to make it look like a compliment.
I bet they’re the same people who smugly say “Oh I don’t see colour”
I’d say so, yes.
Yes, be Inspired. Be deeply moved by my ability to keep a schedule! Marvel at my basic social skills! Gasp in amazement at my honor roll status! Be conveniently absent when I stay up until 2 to finish work that my autistic brain forgot existed!
“Oh, pooh, Keri is clearly not suffering from social anxiety OR autism-spectrum symptoms. She’s a receptionist for godsake!” but did they see me painstakingly learning how to modulate my voice and how to appear friendly and welcoming when I was in high school, and later specifically getting a job in retail at the mall to teach myself how to cope with strangers (and all the meltdowns I had at work during the holiday seasons such that my managers ultimately agreed to always let me work in the back only or not at all between Christmas and New Years). or, hell, the years and years of MOOs that I used to learn social cues from text RPGs.
(I’m pretty bad at social stuff outside of customer service contexts, or when the customers deviate from the usual scripts, unfortunately. But I’m always too exhausted to do anything social outside of work anyway, so I guess it works out.)
Anyway, yes, this post is Too Real and needs to back down a bit from realism thanks.
“They can’t be autistic, they looked me in the eye and smiled and laughed at my jokes!” Okay, sure, but how much effort did that take? Just because they made it look natural doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of thought that went into that performance, doesn’t mean that the social interactions you take for granted as intuitive weren’t painstakingly learned and aren’t managed consciously.
Also, most people can’t tell the difference between “appropriate eye contact” and “looking at your glasses/eyelashes/a sort of vague spot in between your eyes but not quite as low as your nose”.
Or at least they can’t when I’m wearing glasses.
People are shocked when I tell them about the right-above-the-nose-bridge “eye contact” trick, but sometimes it’s fucking impossible to maintain real eye contact and a real conversation.
I…. might not even bother trying “real” eye contact anymore, because it didn’t seem to be getting results that were any better than the very close facsimile I’m more comfortable with.
And I’d question myself, thinking that perhaps everyone notices but is too nice to say anything, except I then mentioned it to my partner, who was SHOCKED to hear that I do that, and then was looking for it, and still couldn’t tell. (and thought I was doing actual eye contact because we’d just talked about it, but no.)
Wait, there are really people who look directly into someone’s eyes and not just very close by? I guess I’m never looking closely enough to notice…
Wait, that’s not how other people do eye contact? Other people literally just, like, stare each other in the eyes all the time? How do they DO that?
But which eye do they look at?? There’s generally two of them and they aren’t really close enough to look at the same time!
#TeamNoseBridgeSpot4Life
Prolonged eye contact is weird as hell for everyone. I don’t know who’s suggesting that these people are the “normal” ones, but if I was having a conversation with someone who refused to break eye contact, I’d start wondering how many bodies they had in their freezer.
One of the most romantic moments ever was when the boy (not diagnosed, but probably somewhere on the spectrum) told me that with other people he looked at their eyebrows, but that somehow he was fine looking into my eyes. Don’t know for sure if it’s the truth, but I’ll take it.
d’aaaaaw.
You can’t possibly have ADHD, you always seem like you stay so organized- you’re always writing things down.
Ignore that the reason I spend 2-3x as much time on “being organized” as everyone else you know is not, in fact, a sign that I am naturally more organized than everyone else you know but clearly a sign that it’s an impossibly huge amount of work for me to NOT forget the basic things that other adults around me are doing without thinking about it.
OY. I have Lyme Disease/CFS/Fibromyalgia, and people not believing it’s real is such a thing. Or else they heard about some treatment and think you should just do that and be fine, like you haven’t already tried everything that could possibly be legit and a few things that almost certainly aren’t (“It has only helped 1% of users? So you’re saying there’s a chance!”)
I’ve been able to keep my full-time-and-then-some job, but I can see how that would be impossible if my condition got a bit worse. Already, I’ve only been able to do so because my work is pretty flexible schedule-wise and not physically demanding. Plus, I can look and act totally fine most of the time that people see me out and about…which is often after I’ve spent an hour or two doing stuff to reduce the pain and stiffness, and just before I have to head home because I can tell I’m going downhill fast and need to lie down before I literally CAN’T stand up any longer with the fatigue and dizzy spells.
Go to Quor’toth, insurance company PI.
Quor’toth is defs where those types belong!
OMG. I have daily migraines and this sounds so much like my life, especially the part about people recommending ridiculous treatments that completely trivialize the pain I’m in.
“Oh, you have migraines? You probably have food allergies! Have you tried eating exclusively rice for a month?”
“Oh, migraines? Probably you don’t exercise enough!”
“Oh, you know what would help? Not thinking about it.”
Young lady, if you are well enough to bend down to pick up dog poop, you are obviously not disabled! Just kidding, I’m right there with you.
And don’t even get started on SSDI, which recently denied my application despite my SS Blue Book-listed condition that should have led to quick approval. Now I get to wait an ENTIRE YEAR for a hearing. I can’t work, so how do I survive with no money for a whole year? Thanks SSDI, u r awesome.
I now also hate doctors. Apparently my pain and illness are preventing me from being sparkly and inspirational enough. My gastroenterologist wrote at my last visit that I needed counseling and should be put on welbutrin. A gastroenterologist! My orthopedist wrote that I was “angry”. Would anger even have been mentioned if I were man? Isn’t a touch of anger expected from sick people with endless complications?
I’m so tired of their judgemental crap! I guess I need to work on how to be a chipper party-girl, while at the same time appearing “sick enough” that I’m not accused of being a faker or complainer.
AHHHHHHH we’re dealing with SSDI for the second round right now and I am so angry about it all. the. time. It’s my husband’s second application, not second denial, btw. We went through the whole process only to be told that he was clearly disabled but he didn’t have enough medical records (he grew up and spent his adult life before marrying me in poverty and varying bouts of homelessness) to “prove” it. Now that he has the records, here’s hoping the adversarial system doesn’t find some other excuse to deny him despite the fact that his hands don’t fucking work right.
(not a lawyer) There are organizations who pre-screen individuals, and if your case is likely enough to get accepted eventually, they will help you with your application, no up front fee. However, they take some sort of cut later on (not permanently, but often some % of a certain number of months, or a cut of a retro lump sum).
It may be worth looking into.
(Also, while we’re talking about “worth looking into”…. some states have a supplemental process, and are sometimes easier to get approved for. that can get complicated too—- ie, if you get approved for state before federal, sometimes you end up with a monthly check earlier, but some of a federal lump sum payment gets redirected to the state to reimburse them, but at least you’re getting more money earlier.)
Quor'toth is defs where those types belong!
One of the most romantic moments ever was when the boy (not diagnosed, but probably somewhere on the spectrum) told me that with other people he looked at their eyebrows, but that somehow he was fine looking into my eyes. Don't know for sure if it's the truth, but I'll take it.
I worked for an insurance company and reading these reports was the best/worst part of the job. One of the summaries included the phrase “she looked normal, in an unphotogenic way”. UNPHOTOGENIC WAY.
This is so real. Thank you.
Deepest sympathies, as I'm in the same boat. As infuriating as comments from laymen are, it's the lack of sympathy from doctors that is the very worst. Why would you even become a neurologist if you don't believe in the severity of your patient's pain?
Also: asking about disability paperwork does not make me a scam artist, so please don't roll your eyes at me, say "we don't do that. It's not like you have MS or something" and walk out of the room. Just had to get that off my chest. The other neurologist my insurance will cover says (without seeing me) that chronic migraine cannot be disabling "without mental retardation". What?
I'm a part time wheelchair user, as are many people, and whenever I'm out with the walking stick instead, which is usually to get me to a taxi y the door but occasionally I manage a walk, I am terrified that someone will report me for not using the wheelchair and I will lose my welfare benefits (i.e. entire income) and possibly end up in the press.
You are more likely to be believed when you are using a mobility aid, but you are also stared at much more, treated worse, and more likely to be subjected to hate crime, in my experience. Which includes assault, and someone deliberately stopping about an inch short of running us over while yelling, "I'll put you in a wheelchair!" to my partner, and plenty of verbal abuse, including from medical staff.
I'd say so, yes.