I loathe waiting rooms...particularly doctors waiting rooms! As you walk what seems the impossibly long distance from the entrance door to the reception area, you know that everyone sat waiting for their appointment...is staring directly at you.......looking you up and down, through their haze of boredom and bacteria, inwardly criticising and assessing all aspects of your life, purely through their evaluation of whatever your sickly form has managed to drape over its ailing frame that morning.
The good news is that, once you have survived this moment of public ridicule and humiliation, you can sit with the rest of the Judging Panel and take the piss out of some other poor, ill sod when they stagger in.
You look at the rasping old dear in the corner and, as her fragile body bends and buckles under the strain of a hacking cough, you think to yourself..."the only thing keeping her together is phlegm"!...before continuing your viral vigil whilst trying to avoid inhaling or ingesting any air borne spittle!
Much to my annoyance, recent events found me sitting in one of these places, lolling with the lousy...and not in a laugh-out-loud kinda way. I was just in the process of mentally diagnosing a middle aged man, whose gait and facial expression suggested he'd spent a considerable amount of time travelling on horseback with a cactus for a saddle...when two women and a child of about six years of age shuffled in and plonked themselves down in the row of seats directly in front of me.
During the course of the 'wait' the two ladies, who I presumed to be mother and daughter, seemed to think we inmates at the surgery were part of a child-minding service, dedicated to the entertainment of the unruly kid who accompanied them.The kid being the kind of kid whose objective in life will be to piss people off, AND given the mother's pathetic, whispered, half arsed attempt to control him...he will succeed spectacularly in his endeavours to do so...probably already having earned himself a Fisher Price Asbo at least!
Anyway, after a while of my enduring the fact that neither women could be bothered with the boy, and my resentfully realising that I was beginning to feel quite sorry for him...I put up with his magic tricks and his incessant questioning.... thus becoming a peculiar part of his upbringing...for at least half an hour anyway...
Oh and, as all this was going on, to my left there sat an elderly lady, whose knees were nonchalantly positioned at quarter to three...leaving me in little doubt as to her medical complaint!!....
Still, on the whole, whilst I feel I exit these places more affected than I enter them...sometimes my life does feel a little richer for the experience. Not necessarily from a medical perspective...but from my learning to appreciate the value of the ever unreeling film of fascinating characters who I've encountered, as I've dawdled on the edge of madness and disease, thanks to the bizarrely entertaining company of the unusual and the un-diagnosed ...
©Copyright Lynn Gerrard 2.8.2012
