See www.ssa.gov for advice about Social Security in the US.
You are eligible for SSDI! Find a disability lawyer who will fill out the application for you. By law, it will cost you nothing. It took me about four months to get approved.
Not all disability lawyers are the same, I had one, was chosen based on google reviews (ignorant, not knowing that they can and do indeed purge their bad reviews). I filed in May 2014, I eventually had to go and request the aid of a social worker (new to me) to go to the SSA office to see what was wrong after my case was denied, and the lawyer failed to appeal. He just sat in the chair, slumped in his chair, like a teen boy, playing on his computer during the hearing, and didn’t say or do a darned thing, I was so mad! I kept waiting, ignorantly, on him to send something to me in the mail, nada! Hard lesson learned.
I had to re-file a little over a year ago and won in a matter of a couple of months, but lost all of the back pay that my former case had. The people at the SSA office were so nice to work with, and just shook their head about the lawyer, there wasn’t anything they could do. I looked at the lawyer’s feedback, and every once in a while, a bad review comes in, and it’s gone a week or two later. It’s beyond belief. The social worker didn’t charge me anything. (An SSDI laywer will charge about 6,000 dollars… if you are already living in poverty due to not being able to work, you will likely not regret not paying one, nor waiting on one for years like I did).
I’m so sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. I’m curious, if you don’t mind my asking, why didn’t you get back pay? That’s how your SSDI lawyer gets paid, and you’re entitled to it. My experience, for a change, couldn’t have gone better.