An update on things going on in my life

The good news is that I haven't been kicked off SSI.  This in turn means that I still have health insurance.  Really good health insurance when it comes to paying for prescriptions which happens to be my largest healthcare related expenditure.  (While I'm at school the cost of seeing my psychologist and psychiatrist is covered by student health services thingy.)

The bad news is more varied.  They cut back what they're paying me by about $200 a month.  At the same time I lost food money because a form didn't get where it was supposed to go* and by the time I realized that that's what had happened as opposed to it simply not having arrived yet everything had taken place.

Food money was also approximately $200 a month.  I don't think it was quite exact, but it was close.

So that's $400ish a month that I'll have to somehow come up with just to get back at the "always on the edge of disaster" level I have been at previously.

Problems related to this, and problems with my furnace and such meant that the semester was basically doomed.  The mere idea of dropping out breaks my heart, but it was the smart, reasonable, intelligent thing to do.

The good news is that an argument can be made, and will be made by my psychologist, that while any person in their right mind would be perturbed and distracted by the confluence of unfortunate events this semester, the fact that I didn't have a chance of passing was, at least in part, due to my mental health and thus medical reasons.

That wouldn't make a difference when it comes to grades, the deadline for dropping without penalty was today and I dropped classes yesterday.  What it might do, though, is get me a partial refund and, if you look at things, I definitely need money.

Obviously I'll reapply for food stamps, but that other $200ish I don't know how I'm going to deal with ($2,400ish a year) and it would certainly be nice to have the money from the classes I'm not taking to draw off of in order to have some time to think.

On the other hand, remember what I said about it breaking my heart to even think of dropping out?  Part of it is that I hate quitting in general.  Part of it is that there was only one class I was in that actually seemed like a bad class.  But the heart-breaking-ness it was even more so in one of the classes because ... because it had very little front loaded work which means that in terms of actual grades in the books I hadn't fallen behind, because the teacher and another student expressed a willingness to work with me on not needing to quit, because it's a really interesting class.

So I decided to not drop out of that class, gambling that with the lowered stress from not trying to catch up in the other classes, and the free time given by not being enrolled in the other classes, I might be able to catch up and do well in it.

But not dropping everything might jeopardize my odds of getting money back.  I ... don't have a lot of sympathy for that position.  I get that they don't want to have people using it as an excuse to eliminate bad grades by picking and choosing.  (The withdrawal deadline I mentioned is for anyone to withdraw without penalty, a medical one, if accepted, can be done after the fact.)  That said, the reasoning, "If she can do one class, then she can do four," is hideous.  If that were the case, if you can do four, why not sixteen?  If everyone did sixteen courses a semester they'd all get four year degrees in one year.

On the third hand, I'm not totally convinced that a medical withdrawal is justified anyway.  Most people would probably find it hard to do schoolwork when their computer broke, they ran out of heat, their boiler broke, and they weren't sure where they'd get money to buy food or if they could afford to stay in their house.

Back on the first hand, it was my psychologist who brought up the possibility and, after some soul searching, he's come to the conclusion that he thinks it's justified, and he should know better than me.

So I've gone from four classes to one.

Keeping the one has positives beyond anything related to the class itself.  Having school gets me out of the house and interacting with other human beings.  The walk to and from is a steady source of exercise (it's an hour and a half to two hours each way.)  Attending in general imposes a structure on my weeks.

So that's where that stands.

-

* It's possible that it was lost in the mail.  That would be the explanation that absolves me of responsibility.  It's also possible that in my frantic attempt to get all of the SSI review stuff done, I sent the HHS form to the SSA office by mistake.  Too many three letter things.