u/dirtyreddog89

Just had a root canal and I was around some guys and I made a stupid mistake. They asked me how my tooth was doing, and I told him that the VA got me into a dentist really fast and it was taken care of and that I feel much better. I forgot one of them was a vet and he asked me “ How did you get dental work? That’s the only thing they won’t do unless you’re 100”?

I was like …. “Yeah I had some dental stuff got messed up overseas and they said it could have been because of chemicals so it’s service connected”.

From the very beginning i was not being very confidential about it. Mainly because I was talking it often because I was trying to learn about the process. Those around me knew whenever I became 50%. However, I have long since decided nobody would ever know that it reached 100. So now people ask me about it. I’m still at 50%. Can’t believe I didn’t think about the dentist thing.

Three and a half years ago I was at 0%. Today I’m 100% P&T. But the way I got across the line , and almost lost it , put me through the wringer, and I need to share it.

This last round of appeals I had a few paths going at once. The one I had zero faith in was the cervical. It was my fourth exam for it after three bad ones, it was an hour away, getting newly connected is brutally hard, and the examiner was blunt and gave me no confidence. I left certain I’d wasted my time.

Then my anxiety HLR got denied : the path I was most sure of. I was speechless.

A few days later, 4:30 in my office, the decision dropped. I opened the letter and scrolled to the pay number. Much higher. Scrolled to the rating: 100%. My eyes teared up. The decision: 100% P&T ,,,,30% cervical plus bilateral radiculopathy. (Two 20 percent ratings). 40% for my back coming later. The one exam I thought was a waste of time was the one that put me over the top. Hands shaking.

Then the whiplash started.

The award came in with the wrong effective date, and my lawyer said it was a CUE that would date my 100% all the way back to 2021 …. astronomical backpay (not putting the number out there). I was on top of the world.

Then a crushing email. There was a flaw buried in the cervical exam, and my lawyer told me that without the cervical, I could lose my 100%. A CUE. The box was checked for more likely than not but it was in the terra section with a negative opinion. Of course, because how the world was cervical related to Tera.

Just like that, the thing I’d fought years for was hanging by a thread. I couldn’t live with that …a CUE trumps almost every protection there is, and I kept picturing someone surfacing it years down the road and pulling the rating.

So I got stuck on the math, and this is where it came down to a hair. The VA rounds your combined rating to the nearest 10 ,,, land at 95 and you keep your 100%, land at 94 and you drop to 90. That was the whole ballgame. My Lawyer said he ran the numbers several time at it was 94.something. The calculators kept giving me conflicting answers because they use a mathematical shortcut that’s usually dead-on but not at a margin this thin. The mathematical shortcut is predictive to how it is calculated by the official VA table. Very frustrating because he took hours and hours and hours of frantic rumination through AI and Claude before i even realized if there was an actual TABLE the VA officially uses. I could get my true and final answer.

So I found the VA’s actual Combined Ratings Table and worked it by hand. It landed on 95. I did it ten times to be sure. My lawyer confirmed it. I kept my 100% without the cervical … but barely, and I hated how close it was.

The lawyer then said with this news since I wouldn’t lose my 100 if I still wanted to try to get the effective date for cervical, he said that he really believes it’s less likely than not They won’t find it since they’re just looking at the effective date.

Of course it’s a bigger risk, which is why we thought I would lose 100 He didn’t suggest it. He gave a risk assessment of a 20% chance of being found but we’re talking about $10,000 yeah he still told me about it. So kind of goes against what we think about Lawyer. He was really looking out.

Three days of panic attacks. Couldn’t shut my brain off. Then at 3 AM, lying in bed, I pulled the cervical exam up one more time just to read it … and saw it!!!!!!!The examiner actually (meant)to connect it!!! There was a positive opinion right there in the skeletal section; she’d just marked the wrong box. In that area, she wrote a positive Nexus she checked less likely than not in that box. It wasn’t a CUE. She checked the wrong box. My lawyer confirmed it the next day, and the rating was solid after all.

And somewhere in all that whiplash ,, elated, crushed, terrified, relieved, all in the span of a few days ,, it hit me.

I’d spent the whole time chasing backpay, and the second it all felt like it could vanish, I finally saw how blessed I already was. Not by the money. By what these benefits actually mean for my family: my kids’ college fully covered, the whole family insured, the compensation tax-free, and enough backpay to wipe out every bit of debt we had ,,, both cars, $60k in student loans, all of it. No debt now, real security.

It took nearly losing all of it to make me grateful for what I’d had the whole time. So if you’ve got your 100 rating, don’t ever lose that feeling from the day you were awarded .. go back to it on the bad days, the moment your eyes teared up and your hands were shaking. And read your own file. Know whether you’ve got a CUE or not. My entire rollercoaster came down to one wrongly checked box I only caught because I finally sat down and read the thing.

Thank you, all of you.