Insurance Denied Claim, Said I'm "Faking." My Disability Lawyer Who Never Lost Made One Call

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday morning, which seems fitting now. Tuesdays have always been the forgotten day—not quite the fresh start of Monday, nowhere near the promise of Friday. Tuesdays are when the world slides its cruelty under your door and hopes you won't notice until it's too late. I noticed. My name is Catherine Mercer, and for twenty-three years, I was a structural engineer. I designed the bones of buildings—the invisible architecture that kept hospitals standing, schools safe, bridges suspended over rivers that had been flowing since before humans walked their banks. I understood load-bearing walls and stress distribution. I knew how to calculate exactly how much weight a foundation could carry before it cracked. I never thought to apply those calculations to myself. The pain started in my hands first. Small tremors when I held my coffee cup, a weakness in my grip that I attributed to too many hours at the drafting table. Then it spread—fingers that wouldn't close properly, wrists that screamed when I tried to rotate them, shoulders that felt like they'd been filled with ground glass. My doctor sent me to a specialist. The specialist sent me to another specialist. The second specialist sent me for tests—MRIs, nerve conduction studies, blood panels that measured things I can't pronounce.