Two days ago, my wife came in and I was downstairs in the work room where I store my files, and I couldn't stop crying, because I wanted to be true to you when I came back here to make sure I truly understood what was written in my medical reports. And the conditions were there. They're real. Then, as I was crying on the phone to Louise, she asked me about these presumptive conditions that I was mentioning. I looked them up. As we know, Australia and the United States both have these presumptive conditions, and this is what I believe Mr. Casey was talking about when he talked in 2013. A presumptive condition is to get a diagnosis—maybe the intensity of that diagnosis—so they can assess your disability level. That's all you need to get a disability pension, because that diagnosis is recognized as consequential to your service.
I have here a list of Gulf War presumptive conditions that have been in place for years. And we still can't get there.
On the first four—chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, functional gastrointestinal disorders and medically unexplained multi-pain symptoms—I had them all, but I had to prove them. I had to prove them first to CPP in an 80-page testimony. Then I had to prove them to SISIP in another 80-page submission. Then I had to prove them to Veterans Affairs. Then I had to prove them again to Veterans Affairs in their departmental review, then I had to provide them evidence for that review, then I had to do another departmental review. A presumptive condition would have ignored all of that. In 1990, $30,000 was a lot of money, but it's not the big problem. It's the suffering that comes with my having to prove that case like a lawyer and a police investigator, beyond any doubt. I mean, I've never experienced this benefit of the doubt that exists in Veterans Affairs, apparently. I can tell you that my having to prove that case was grossly debilitating and set me back years. I could have been working. I could have been putting those efforts into retraining.