Premium Parking, Unwanted Membership: When a Small Piece of Mail Brought a Difficult Truth into Focus

When I returned home from the hospital, I wasn’t able to drive. I went 2.5 months without driving. My doctor issued me a temporary accessible parking pass, as at the time I was still occasionally using a cane to get around. When it came time for renewal, she extended it for a year, hopeful that time would heal (some) of the wounds and that I would no longer need an accessible pass beyond that.

I got something in the mail today. No longer temporary, it’s now a permanent accessible parking pass. At my last appointment, my doctor didn’t hesitate to make it permanent. She said something along the lines of, “it’s evident now that this is your baseline,” recognizing that mobility isn’t always great, balance isn’t always great, and as my therapeutic Botox wears off, things really aren’t great at all.

On paper, that kind of label sounds like a small administrative change. In reality, it lands heavier than that. It quietly settled into everything I'd already been negotiating since my stroke: Capacity, variability, and the invisible effort it takes just to get through a day that looks “fine” from the outside.

There is, of course, still stigma about who should and should not use an accessible parking pass. The very image of a wheelchair-bound person does little to change that. But physical challenges aside, mobility impacted by neurological conditions also makes one eligible.

That’s part of what makes this complicated: neurological recovery doesn’t follow a straight line. Some days I move through the world with relative ease. Other days, fatigue, balance, and coordination shift the equation completely. From the outside, those two versions of me can look identical, until suddenly they’re not.

We previously posted this on BrainStorm. What are your thoughts?

Let me be clear (and I feel a little troubled that I even need to say this): I don’t use the parking pass all of the time. In fact, I don’t use it most of the time. I know there are others who desperately need it more than I do. But there are also days when I do need the proximity to front doors; days when fatigue has challenged my mobility. That variability doesn’t make the need less real. It just makes it less visible. Some of those days, people give me the side-eye. They don’t know what I know.

So when I got the “permanent” form from my doctor, I was both relieved and disheartened. Relief that support is recognized without debate. Disheartened because it also confirms something I didn’t necessarily want confirmed so plainly.

Both can be true at once. The stroke took a lot, but apparently it also unlocked the "premium parking package" and a lifetime discount on Ontario Parks camping. Not the membership card I was aiming for, but it does come with a few perks!