I am in the Air Guard and I am a dual status technician. I did 5 years of active duty before joining the guard and ended up with 20% va disability for my shoulder. Our clinic kept trying to say maybe I needed to get out when I first joined the guard in 98 due to my va disability. Since I have been in, I have injured my shoulder a few times, once we started LOD paperwork but now looking back it does not seem like it was completed. Then when I was deployed to the Deid, I injured it again. Whiplash that had the backs of my hands go numb and couldn't turn my neck. I have paperwork in my med records for this appt but there are no Dr notes on it even though they prescribed medication (pain pill/flexeril/motrin) and I had made a note in my post deployment paperwork.
Since returning from this deployment my neck/shoulder pain has gotten a lot worse, I have nerve pain down my arm and in 2015 through my personal insurance had a disc replacement surgery for this. It helped for about a year but if I do hardly anything with my right arm I am in a lot of pain, my arm will swell up and it is bad. Due to being a technician I have just sucked it up. I had another issue come up and I have to go through the IDES process. We are going forward due to my shoulder but I do not have an LOD for either of these events. They have submitted paperwork for this, but i was told that even with the LOD they may go down the route of non duty disability due to having been cleared to work after these events.
I was originally hurt on active duty and it has gone downhill from there and the case of whiplash I believe has made it a lot worse. Is there anything I can do to try to keep it on the military side of the board vs non duty?
Since returning from this deployment my neck/shoulder pain has gotten a lot worse, I have nerve pain down my arm and in 2015 through my personal insurance had a disc replacement surgery for this. It helped for about a year but if I do hardly anything with my right arm I am in a lot of pain, my arm will swell up and it is bad. Due to being a technician I have just sucked it up. I had another issue come up and I have to go through the IDES process. We are going forward due to my shoulder but I do not have an LOD for either of these events. They have submitted paperwork for this, but i was told that even with the LOD they may go down the route of non duty disability due to having been cleared to work after these events.
I was originally hurt on active duty and it has gone downhill from there and the case of whiplash I believe has made it a lot worse. Is there anything I can do to try to keep it on the military side of the board vs non duty?