The Den o'Iniquity

As almost everyone who reads this should be aware, I've been a fully paid up member of the military industrial complex for a while now, doing my part defending your freedom. Most people will also know that I harbor ambitions to make this into a full-time career path. In this case, though, I have discovered that sometimes ambitions are not without consequences.
In order to further this ambition, I had applied to the Regular Commissions Board (RCB), the body which decides the fitness of potential officer candidates to proceed to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for a 9-month training course and then onto posts in the regular army. Obviously, there is a significant amount of vetting involved: background checks, fitness tests, "psychometric testing" (testing whether psychos can use the metric system, or something similar) and a whole barrage of medical tests. A few things make these tests slightly more interesting for me than most people: my MI5 file, my asperger's syndrome and the fact that I was in therapy back in the day, among other things. But these were all tests I had done to get into my current unit at the Officer Training Corps. Or so I thought. What I hadn't got before was a full check of my past medical record. This brought up a problem. The letter I received last Tuesday (the 19th) from RCB, said that I was unsuitable for a commission due to: "fits and seizures since the age of 5", this I found slightly worrying and very surprising since I had no recollection of anything of that type. Understandably enough, I quickly made an appointment with my doctor who couldn't fit me in until last Thursday (the 21st) and then showed me my file. What I discovered was that this had nothing to do with anything I had expected, but was actually from when I was 9 and 10. At this age, I had had headaches, which I had subsequently thought were probably psychosomatic, related to the fact I was being bullied at the time. Back then they did send me for a whole barrage of tests (though never telling me anything) and down in my file is the results of those tests. That they thought my headaches were most probably caused by temporal lobe epilepsy. Now, despite the fact that nothing had happened in 10 years and that I never actually had fits, this was a death sentence on my military career. This was classified as "multiple epileptic incidents since the age of 5" and makes me permanently unsuitable for a military career. On Tuesday (the 26th) I had to go and hand my kit back, uniform and all and sign a medical discharge form. Not only can I now never join the regular army, I can't even stay in the OTC. This is why my week has sucked. Fortunately my academic department gave me a week off to get myself together so I'm back home in Newcastle for a few days.
Shit Happens, The T.