For anyone who will listen, I just wanted to mention that yesterday I had a VES C&P Exam for Nerve Pain for my wrist. (Command thought it was a good idea to play football on wetgrass, and someone crashed into me, resulting in a Closed Fracture)

Anyway, something that surprised the nurse practitioner is that I brought everything related to the case. From ER notes, to important points/mentions of my wrist in the medical record. I also had a scanned version of my entire medical record.

She said to me “In the entire two years I have been doing this, you were the first person to bring notes.” And yes, this made her happy. Even though she read the notes the VA Sent her, she still copied Verbatim what I printed out from the medical record.

That is shocking to me that I was the first one. I wanna really underscore this point, you get one shot at this to do this right. BRING YOUR NOTES. I had a previous C&P Examiner forget a signed witness statement. In this appointment, the VA/VES tried to evaluate my elbow when nothing is wrong with it. Also, the darn doctor who did my last X-Ray before I got out forgot to write the darn notes and interpretation!

Having paperwork and the scanned copy let everyone (including you) show what was missed.

I hope this makes sense. I struggle with memory loss, just I keep thinking about how she said I was the only one.

My fellow vets, you are shorting yourself.

You are amazing and you did great things, just keep in mind examiners see dozens of vets a week and they are expected to read every single page and word on that page.

Don’t short yourself, if you got to examination, you deserve the best and greatest chance of the most accurate rating.

Very Respectfully,

A Former Navy Corpsman (Doc)

P.S. It would not hurt to describe your pain on the 0-10 scale, 10 being the worst and incapacitating pain. Even a 1 is countable and they should put that in the eval report.