Marta stared at the words. She wanted to scream. Substantial? She couldn’t vacuum. She couldn’t drive. She couldn’t stand to cook a meal. What did “substantial” mean, if not the slow, daily erosion of her entire existence?
“Sometimes,” she said, not mentioning that a “good day” happened once a week. apply odsp
For the next three months, Marta became a ghost in the system. She called the ODSP office and was put on hold for an hour, only to be disconnected. She received a letter requesting a “functional abilities assessment” with a doctor she’d never met, two cities away. She borrowed bus fare from her ex-husband, a transaction so humiliating she cried in the bus shelter. Marta stared at the words
Begin again.
And she did. She told him about the morning she had to choose between cooking breakfast and brushing her teeth because both would exhaust her. About the panic attack in the grocery store aisle, overwhelmed by the sheer physical effort of reaching for a can of soup. About the night she lay on the bathroom floor for three hours because she was too weak to get back to bed. She couldn’t vacuum
Outside her basement apartment, a November rain glued dead leaves to the sidewalk. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of cold brew coffee and unwashed laundry. Marta’s back was a knot of twisted steel, the familiar flare-up that had started three days ago after she’d simply tried to carry a bag of groceries home.
The new doctor was a brisk, young man who seemed impatient with her cane, her wince, her slow answers. “On a good day, can you make a sandwich?” he asked.
