Last Updated on November 15, 2014
Capillaries represent the smallest of the body’s blood vessels, which cumulatively account for the greater part of the microcirculatory means of reaching extremities and body under-surfaces beyond the reach of major veins. Bursting or damaging a few here and there have little effect; cutting a capillary or bruising resulting from a blow to a branch of them, will have residual reverberations of unnoticed proportions.
But then, that is how most lives are considered, and treated; not as major arterial avenues of pumping stations, but way stations and secluded outposts visited only when mandated by necessity, and even then sporadically and with grumbling trepidation. But it is the very constancy of the work of capillaries which uphold the arterial integrity of the major vessels of society; and while most Federal and Postal workers go about their business in a daily routine within the quietude of unnoticed efficiency, it is when an interruption of a major event interposed upon a singular individual, that one must take pause and notice the otherwise uneventful event in a life of a capillary-like existence.
Chronic injuries and disabling conditions tend to do that to us. For the individual who suffers from a medical condition, the traumatic life-event become a major obstacle; for the rest of society, it is the mere interruption and inconvenience of a capillary’s constancy being cut off. The major vessels of life continue to pound away, pumping with rhythmic efficiency and barely taking notice of the lack of lifeline to the outreaches of peripheral concerns; but for the individual capillary, the crushing of life represented by a medical condition is a major event of exponentially significant proportions. Federal and Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, and whose medical condition prevents one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, need the respite of recuperative time; but like capillaries damaged or otherwise severed, they are often forgotten immediately following the event.
Whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS-Offset, Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who can no longer perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, may be eligible for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management; but one must prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, the nexus between the medical condition and the positional requirements of one’s Federal or Postal job. It is, in the end, the relevance of the whole organism and the efficiency of the body entirety, that matters; and to that extent, of the capillary constancy that results when significance is discovered for each outpost in the life of a human being.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire