waiting

The good thing about attending routine appointments is the waiting. Inevitably, although we are told to turn up ten minutes before the allotted appointment time with our dentist/doctor/opticians, we always find ourselves sitting on chairs in a waiting room, waiting. 

I like this dead time. There is nothing I can reasonably do but read. The nagging whispers that I should be attending to housework, or tackling some task, or running an errand are silenced, because I literally cannot do any of those things here. I can't even phone my mom, because there is no privacy. So I sit and read and for a while all the pressures of life are off me.

And so I expected it to be yesterday, when I went to see a doctor I didn't know about something I didn't want to talk about. It might be fair to say that I had even looked forward to this waiting time, which might say how bad things have been at home lately, but which also says that the waiting area in the clinic I attend is a fairly pleasant one. We are not cramped into some corner or placed as obstacles down the side of a corridor, but are accorded our own open plan space, lit by generous sky lights and decorated with actual live plants, exotic ones, in raised beds. 

I had been sitting and reading for much less than ten minutes before I realised there was a problem. I am sensitive to noise and somewhere there was a young chap making a racket, accompanied by his mother's nagging him to stop. Pretty soon he was running around the raised beds of exotic plants, a path that took him right past my shoes. 

My first reaction was annoyance. It was hard to lose myself in my book with his squealing and his mother's persistent nagging, and the having to pull my feet out of the way every time he ran past. I was also not feeling well. My whole head felt warm and heavy, and it pulsed hotly every time the boy squealed and his mother shouted. There was also the fact that I had been having quite enough drama in my own life without having to be witness to someone else's. The only break I could manage was a wait in a doctor's surgery and even that was being denied me.

But neither the mother or the kid were doing this to get at me. The mother, at the moment, was obviously having a bad time, and I'm not one of those who judges mothers in public for their children's behaviour. Not since I adopted my two.

So, instead, I briefly wondered if I could help. I quickly decided that I couldn't. I could offer the mother a sympathetic smile, but her tactic for dealing with this public humiliation was to act with complete lack of self-consciousness. She stalked her son around the room with abandon, speaking loudly and crudely, as if a dozen strangers were not witnessing her inability to control her son in real time, and if that was her way of coping I wasn't going to break her little fantasy by making eye contact. I could catch the lad as he ran past me, as she was having difficulty catching him by herself, but who these days would do that? Imagine grabbing someone else's child in public? Nope.

So I struggled on with my book. Occasionally they took their little drama around the corner to a distant part of the waiting room and I forgot about them for a bit. But then they would be back. I've seen hyper kids before, but this chap was something else. I thought how painful an existence it must be, to be powered by such high voltage. I wondered about his mum. If she had people who helped her or if like us most people had fled.

I longed for her doctor to come out of their office and call them in. Longed for it. But in the almost hour that I sat waiting for my own appointment, I saw maybe only three people called in by their doctor. I'm pretty sure I saw only two people leave too. I do not get this doctor's waiting room mathematics. It seems to me that some people emerge from their doctor's office after half an hour or more and yet I have never had an appointment that lasted more than five minutes. No matter what dread dark human problem I take into a doctor's office, I am always dispensed with quickly. And if I am not alone in this experience, this should mean that doctor's offices are revolving doors of patients going in and out, but they never are. You can sit for an hour and the people in the waiting room hardly changes, and only very occasionally a man, women, or couple, or family, will emerge out of a doctor's office that you didn't even know was occupied, and you can feel the relief in the room. Everyone thinking that they have moved up the queue somehow, even if that's not the doctor they have come to see. But then the doctor's door closes and remains closed and we're all left waiting again.

My own doctor had called no one in before she called me, even though I had arrived early for my appointment and had sat waiting for three quarters of an hour. I can't think what she was doing in that room for almost an hour, late morning, if not seeing patients. Another doctor I knew and would have preferred to see, but whom didn't have an appointment free until September, left his office at some point locking his door behind him. I hadn't seen him call a patient in at all. I'd like to think that when they are not with patients that they are making important phone calls, chasing up test results, and writing long and important letters on their patients behalf, but my capacity to give professionals their due is severally compromised by experience.  

The mother and hyper child were eventually called in not long before my doctor called me in, the mother managing to grab her son just after they had raced past me, and I put my thumb up and nodded approvingly as if to say "good catch". In return she blew her hair out of her face and rolled her eyes and I liked her in that instance. So did everyone else too, and there was a general outpouring of amused relief amongst all the waiting people as she disappeared into the doctor's office. 

Unfortunately the noise didn't stop, because the boy upped his squeals to a scream inside the office, and had we not all seen how bad the boy was before, we might have been concerned. But we weren't concerned. He was with a doctor now.

I eventually got to see a doctor too. I had not met her before and started off with high hopes because she seemed professional and efficient, but I soon became disappointed. She wasn't one for listening. She told me she would phone me "either today or next week" and when people say that they always mean next week. And so more waiting, although this time I'm not sure what I'm waiting for.