Diminished In Waiting Rooms

There are all kinds of myths and truths about doctors’ waiting rooms, I suppose. I just prepare myself to suffer incredible fuckass boredom and forget about thinking, usually. Try not to let things penetrate. I recall once a man who’d arrived after I did was complaining and carrying on about “how long” he’d been waiting and some people were getting in before him. One nurse tried to explain that there were multiple schedues (due to multiple medical practitioners) and he had to wait his turn. After the nurse left, I told him, “you must have once been seen promptly at some doctor’s office, a thing that I can hardly imagine!” He snuffled and sat there red-faced until his name was called. It never dawned on him, apparently, that I and some other patients in the waiting room had been there longer than he had.

Waiting in waiting rooms makes everyone murderous, I suppose, but occasionally there’s someone like the above who doesn’t seem to know it’s par for the course. I suppose that the President doesn’t wait at Bethesda Naval Hospital, but I’m not even sure about that.

I do know you can lose your mind in a waiting room. One time recently at the retinal specialist’s office, I sat in the waiting room, unable to see well enough to read the magazines, barely able to see the large TV that was tuned to the Food Channel, and trying to zone out when I became vaguely aware of the strange fare they’d been toodling about on the food shows. I went back through my memory and came up with these two items they seemed to have been just talking about: one was chocolate ravioli, the other was something that at least looked like jellied pubic hair (and was not appetizing!). I later determined that there really was a chocolate ravioli dish, though it still strikes me as being as unlikely as the other! Oh, well. This is how demented one can get in a big comfy waiting room when one’s faculties have been diminished!

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