do buddy letters help?

[bentvalve]

im just asking..i have tracked down 4 of my buddies from the marines.
after catching up with them, i asked if they remembered me sweating..
all of them said yes. im not talking sweating, like 15-20 degrees outside soaking wet.
basically, sweating is what got me diagnosed.
i am wondering if anyone has experience with buddy letters.don

[gomer]

Hi Valve.......

Not sure, I am told they CAN help. My diplopia got a lot worse while on active duty. Navy never got my diplopia prisms right, heck they left them out completely both times in my glasses Rx'd while on active duty. I had to go to a civilian eye doc in Winter Park Fl (stationed at Sanford) just to get useable eye glasses. The new prisms were so much stronger I got teased about coke bottle glasses. I have a SC claim started and a letter from an old buddy that was the biggest teaser.

I say the more the merrier I figure there is a good chance it CAN/MAY help. Anything that might help.


Gomer Sir Falls-a-lot

[Dulcinea714]

A few years back, I got a call from a vet who had been with me in the desert. She was fighting her disability rating and asked if I remembered her breaking her wrist/hand. She fell off a duece days before we went to the desert and the TMC never sent her for xrays, just told her it was a sprain. We get to the desert and field hospital does xray and finds break. She goes home for R&R and goes to Fort Campbell, they did another xray and there was another break that they didn't catch at the field hospital. She asked me to write a letter about my knowledge of her injury, which I did, including my witnessing another NCO making her do push-ups, even though she protested that she had a no push-up profile (I stopped the NCO, but she had already done some push-ups).

A month or two later, I got a call from her and the VA had increased her rating thanks to letters from me and some others in the unit. I would ask your buddies to write down anything they can remember, not just the sweating. You might give them the link to the nmss website, where they can read about MS and see if they recall anything that resembles symptoms that you might have displayed. MS is so weird, that they may recall symptoms that you don't remember experiencing or don't relate to being MS. My friend didn't recall the push-up incident until she read my letter and she told me that my letter really helped to convince the docs that she wasn't trying to scam the system. Tell your friends to write what they remember, in their own words, their own version; you really do not want identical stories, you want what they remember.
Good luck.