Medical Evaluation Board and the Stress it Brings

Military Medical Evaluation Board and the Stress That it Brings

It’s been a little while since my last post and in between all of the craziness of life right now, I have finally gotten a chance to update on what is going on. Back in June I wrote about the chance of a medical separation from the Air Force. In August that became a reality. I was informed on the 16th that I would be undergoing the multiple stage medical evaluation process to see if the Air Force would decide to keep me or if they were going to start the process to separate me. If you have never heard of this process it is called a Medical Evaluation Board or MEB and it can take anywhere from a few months to over a year or more, from start to finish. The first stage of the process was an initial board, where all of my information will be sent up to the medical processing people at big Air Force and there, they decided if I will undergo a full medical separation.

The full process involves both the DoD and Veterans Affairs (VA). I was assigned a Physical Evaluation Board Liaison Officer or PEBLO who will be my guide throughout this process. She told me ideally I should be out around 180 days after the start of my MEB, which would put me right around the end of this year or the beginning of 2022. This 180 days includes any leave I have left as well as any temporary duty days I get for house hunting and preparing for my transition. The other side of this process is the VA side, and for that side I was given a VA representative that helped me set up my appointments to be evaluated by a third party contractor to help figure out what my disability percentages would be, if any were to be awarded. And those percentages will also determine if I will be separated or medically retired from the Air Force.

Up until right now this whole process was going pretty smoothly and quickly. I had all of my appointments set up the second week of this process, and I filled out all of the required forms the same day I had received them. Now it was time to wait for my appointments and the results that would follow. According to what the VA saw on my forms, I was set up for three different types of appointments. The first was a hearing test, the second was a general health exam, and the last was a blood draw. I was also set up for a sleep study, but since I just had one a month prior it wasn’t needed.