TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine (bladder cancer survivor)

[Sandra]

TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine (bladder cancer survivor)

URL Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40291856/ns/travel-news/
Published: Nov 20, 2010
Author: Harriet Baskas

A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla., said he was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an enhanced pat-down by TSA
officers recently at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

“I was absolutely humiliated, I couldn’t even speak,” said Thomas D. “Tom” Sawyer, 61, of Lansing, Mich. Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a
urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his
stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I
have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal
is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”

On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy
bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”

Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really
didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that
I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”

Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in
the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his
ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said
Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition,
they said they didn’t need to know about that.”