Waiting Room Worse Than Some Prisons

In the past six months, my wife Carol and I have logged at least 100 hours in doctors’ waiting rooms. If we have to log one more hour, we’ll be forced to take a receptionist hostage.

“Don’t worry,” we’ll say soothingly. “We’ll release you as soon as the doctor makes an appearance. Now, now. It will do you no good to struggle.”

Carol and I are not, under normal circumstances, terrorists. However, we are people with the dangerous potential to whine a lot if we have to wait much longer in waiting rooms. The waiting room combines the worst elements of a prison with the worst elements of an elevator stuck between floors.

For one thing, time passes with an eerie slowness in a waiting room. People can be absolutely convinced that they have waited two hours, only to glance down at their watches and discover it has been only an hour and 45 minutes. Spooky.

For another thing, a person can’t exactly choose one’s company in a waiting room. I don’t know how to say this delicately, but the fact is everybody there is sick. Not that there’s anything wrong with being sick. We, too, are sick, or we wouldn’t be wasting the better part of Monday in a waiting room.

Yet there is something ironic about being told by your doctor that your white blood cell count is down; that you should stay away from crowds; that you must avoid any contact with cold or flu sufferers; that you should preferably not even leave the house; and that you should please come in to the office tomorrow and sit for 20 minutes in a waiting room full of sniffling, sneezing, hacking, coughing, nose-wiping influenza cases. The place can sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of phlegm.

Are you familiar with those isolation wards in hospitals, where they put patients at high risk for infection? I have no documentation to prove this, but I’ll bet before they admit those patients, they first say, “Please have a seat,” and point them toward the all-sniffling section of the waiting room.

Anyway, once we are in the waiting room we can either enjoy the postnasal-drip version of “Carmina Burana” or we can read the magazines.

The magazines. If I have to read one more People magazine from 1988, I’m going to become ill, which means I’ll fit right in. Nothing is more worthless than an old People magazine, except, of course, a new People magazine. The only difference between the two is that one has far too much information about Prince, and the other has far too much information about the artist-formerly-known-as-Prince.

The National Geographic magazines are more welcome, because they don’t become obsolete quite so quickly. But you know you’ve got an old one when the lead article is “Sarajevo! The World’s Winter Playground!”

And frankly, I’ve been in so many waiting rooms lately that I think I’m going to scream if I have to read the “Deadly Jellyfish of Australia” one more time.

At least the National Geographic magazines have some appeal to a general audience. The worst waiting rooms - and I have done extensive research on this - provide only used medical journals and goofy magazines the doctor brings in from home. The selection might include: The Model Tugboat Collector, Cookin’ With Yogurt, International Yarn, The European Mutual Fund Investor and American Colonoscopy.

Please, I beg of you. Don’t make me read about new techniques in colon diagnosis. Even the all-Mickey Rourke issue of People would be preferable to that.

If you’re lucky, just about the time you start trying to trace out the diagrams in American Colonoscopy, the nurse will march out and announce your name. She will finally escort you out of the waiting room and into …

An even tinier room where you’ll have to stay on simmer for another 15 minutes until the doctor shows up. Except in this room, there are no magazines, the temperature is 52 degrees, and you are stripped to your underwear.

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the old waiting room, where at least you could soak up “The Deadly Jellyfish of Australia” for the 11th time.