Look at the permit, not the person.

  Question for you: What would be your first thought if you saw 2 teenage boys parking in a disabled car park and heading into the shops, looking quite healthy?  Would you stereotype them, think they were lazy or defiant, breaking the

rules?  Would you confront them? Would you check the car for a parking permit?

After reading some responses on one of my other articles, I started thinking about the teenagers with cystic fibrosis I have cared for through the years, and I remembered one conversation in particular that I had with 2 teenage boys with CF.

  These boys had been out and about the day before.  Teenagers with CF will often go out for the day and return to the hospital when the next antibiotic dose or physiotherapy session is due. They had driven to the shops and parked in a disabled car park and started heading towards the mall.  They didn’t make it too far before a security guard stopped them in their tracks and confronted them about parking in the disabled car park.  He had made an assumption, without checking the facts, and began to chastise the boys for doing the wrong thing.

  Easy enough to do.  Most of us would think the same thing, I know I probably would have made that same stereotypical conclusion myself!

  The thing is- these boys had a disabled parking permit for their car.  They look perfectly healthy on the outside, but on the inside their lungs are so ravaged by disease that the extra walk through the car park, might mean that the doors to the mall is as far as they get.  Would you believe 2 teenagers if they tried to explain to you that they were perfectly within their rights to park there?  The security guard did not.  So one of the boys decided on a shock tactic- he raised his top and exposed his Picc line (an intravenous access device inserted into the chest or arm).  The guard soon got the picture, probably feeling ashamed and embarassed, and left the boys alone.

  When I heard the boys describing their experience, I thought it was such as shame that these kids had to endure so much, just to stay alive and functioning relatively well, without having to deal with this rubbish as well.

 The moral of the story: Don’t judge people before you know them, don’t categorize people into stereotypes and expect certain behaviours from them, and check the permit before the person.