This is a disabled parking bay…

This is a disabled parking bay. There are four of them at my son’s school. They are close to the school entrance and they are wider than normal bays. Doesn’t it look inviting?

This is my son Benjamin’s blue badge. I had to apply for it, and pay for it. Many disabled people have to fight for it. It entitles me to park in the disabled bays at my son’s school (and anywhere else) when I have him with me and he will be getting out of the vehicle, or when I will be picking him up and putting him into the vehicle.

These are four of the cars that were parked in the disabled spaces at my son’s school today. None of them is displaying a blue badge.

Maybe their drivers aren’t aware that although this isn’t a public road the school still enforces the blue badge scheme? Maybe they thought they had a good reason to park in the disabled bays – all four of them? Maybe they were short of time? Maybe they’re just lazy? Well, in case any of them are reading this…

Here are some of the reasons I need to park in these bays:

• Benjamin comes with a lot of equipment: not just a wheelchair, but a feeding pump, suction pump, medications, syringes, nappies. More equipment than I can fit on his wheelchair, which means I have to push it with one hand. The further I have to push it with one hand, the less safe that journey is for him. If I have my other children with me, well, they just have to take their chances.
• If I have to park in a normal parking space (if I can get one), it is too narrow to get Benjamin’s wheelchair alongside the car. This means I have to park it (and him in it) behind the car, in the path of other vehicles looking for their own parking spaces.
• If I have to park in a normal parking space (if I can get one), it is too narrow to get Benjamin’s wheelchair alongside the car. This means I have to carry him (all 18 kilos of him) round to the back of the car. I don’t mind the damage to my back. What I do mind is the risk of pulling out his feeding tube, which won’t stretch from his seat to behind the car. If his feeding tube is pulled out, he has to undergo an operation under general anaesthetic to replace it. When Benjamin undergoes an operation under general anaesthetic, he usually comes back ventilated and in intensive care.
• If I have to park on the road (which I usually do, because if the disabled bays are full you can bet it’s because all the non-disabled bays are full), all of the above apply, plus I have to carry Benjamin out into the path of oncoming traffic.
• If I have to park on the road, the likelihood is someone else will park so close up to the back of my car that I won’t be able to open the boot, let alone get Benjamin’s wheelchair into it.
• One of Benjamin’s problems is that he cannot control his own temperature. In the extra time it takes me to get him out of a warm car into his buggy and under a blanket if the buggy is at the back of the car and not beside the door, he can become hypothermic. In the extra time it takes me to push the buggy from the main road to the school, he can become hypothermic. An extra couple of minutes in the cold can mean several hours of struggling to get his temperature and heart rate stabilized at a normal level.
• If Benjamin becomes suddenly ill, which he does, often, without warning, and dangerously, I need to be able to pick him up and get him into the car and off to hospital, pronto. I may not have time to wait for an ambulance. I may not have time to drive around looking for a parking space, walk round the corner from that parking space to the school, and push Benjamin back round that corner to the car. Minutes count.

Here are some of the reasons you may not need to park in these bays:

• You are not disabled
• You don’t have a blue badge
• You don’t have a disabled child
• You don’t have a pile of medical equipment to transport
• You can walk 100 yards without getting hypothermic (no, that’s not an exaggeration)
• You can self-transfer to your car seat
• You don’t need to get a wheelchair into your boot (God forbid need enough space to use a ramp or hoist…)

Now, you may think ‘I’m only parking there for a minute.’ But if that minute is the minute when Benjamin and I arrive at school, you’ve put us in an unsafe situation for the whole day.

You may think this is a small, petty issue. But this issue puts my son, and many others like him (after all, this is a school with a special unit attached that caters for children with severe and complex needs from across the county) at risk.

Please, think again. Thank you.