Waiting Room Madness Essay, Research Paper

Waiting Room Madness

You know the waiting as well as I do. You hate it too. The terrible waiting. The time you dread more than a five foot needle stuck in your backside. You feel the rage. You work harder than hell for some decent medical insurance only to wait like a flea-bitten dog for a miserable bone.

Waiting in line to fill out a form. Waiting for a bubblegum-smacking bimbette to point out an pale plastic seat. The terrible waiting in a terrible waiting room. A colour-coded monstrosity overflowing with wheezing zombies staring a flat-paint walls. Or burying their weird heads in magazines best lining Aunt Betty’s birdcage. The thought of sitting elbow to elbow in a room full of sick people makes me that much sicker.

Admit it! Any person forcing you to wait that long deserves a serious smack in the face. I want to smack him now before I get the bill. I want to smack him for his poor taste in decor. I want to yell and smack the SOB for his magazine selection alone. And I definitely want to smack this germ-carrying freak next to me coughing up the Ebola virus in my direction.

Looking up at the so-called secretary with a tic-tac for a brain, you wonder how these people avoid illness wading through room after room of dancing bacteria. Does their low IQ afford them some special immunity? Does the death of ambition lead to life extension? If I had more time I’d look into this a bit further. Maybe it’s true: only the good die young.

Why does a pharmacist make as much as money as an average doctor? Their difference in education is six years. Yet my pharmacist leaves his drugstore every evening in a BMW and returns in the morning driving a Jaguar. And he’s giving 10% discounts to senior citizens for heart pills. Something is wrong with this picture. If that’s his brain on drugs, I wonder what is house looks like?

I’m not too fond of these doctors either. Nor are you—so don’t deny it. They disguise everything. Stupid white lab coats hide body language. Unreadable handwriting, curiously enough, only pharmacists can read. (Between you and I, they’re working together!) They speak Latin terms most parish priests couldn’t pronounce even if the Pope were sitting in the first pew. Like I said—they disguise everything; before you know it, you’re swallowing nasty orange pills, pissing blue urine, and passing out his business cards by the water cooler.

Someone answer me this: Who gave permission for Nurse Boobjob to call me by my first name? In any other place it’s “Mr. This” or “Sir That,” but at Doctor “sit-your-butt-down-and-wait,” I’m a regular member of the freaking family. I want to offer the young lady an application for the nearest burger joint, but then again, I wouldn’t want one of her implants to fall into the french fryer. Plus, the way franchises operate today, she’d be the only thing in the place qualified as fast food.

What is taking these people so long? I have meetings to attend, places to go, people to sell crap they don’t need. I can make my own diagnoses of most of the people in this terrible waiting room. The guy next to me has the flu. Which means I got it tomorrow. Gracias Amigo. That big lady over there has gout in both her legs. Probably from flipping pancakes for forty years at a greasy-spoon roadstop. The two-year old seems to have an ear infection or maybe she’s upset over the fact that her mother isn’t old enough to have a driver’s license. This doctor stuff is easy, so hurry-the-hell up before I diagnose again!

I need not care if it was a boy or a girl. I want a healthy and happy baby. I want a wife who remembers how to smile in the morning. Not a wife worrying why the baby stopped moving last night. What does a man say when something like that happens? He calls out sick and rushes her to the hospital. He can’t summon any slick line to ease the fear of a pregnant woman who suddenly feels dead inside. It’s out of your hands, a gift from God you helped create, now in the hands of strangers you never met in your life. You’re a man, and it’s out of your hands. You sit still and fight to recall if you told her, you loved her, before the doctor closed the examing room door. You feel ashamed because you just cannot remember. You feel disgusted that your thoughts on not on the baby as much as on your loving wife. You whisper a prayer while holding the waiting room in contempt. You’re a man, but it’s out of your hands. All you can do is wait.