The Doctor's Waiting Room

 

The Doctor’s Waiting Room. 

We've been here since 2 O' Clock. The Doctor's Waiting Room is never empty, always exceeding max capacity.  Sometimes I wonder why my city's so empty, where all the people are – at the Doctor's Waiting Room, awkwardly searching for a seat – I see all the Missing Persons are in here. The electronic token machine mechanically (and yet cheerily) announces the numbers slowly melting away: 18, 19, 20. We're not very cheerful, however.  Like the zesty green money plants and stock paintings of faraway countries they've arranged artfully to give the place more pizzazz, the robotic “chin-up” voice is'nt really working. On the TV mounted at an uncomfortable height on the wall, Tom and Jerry chase each other and fall from absurdly high roofs without any medical bills to worry about. 

We're Token Numbers 28 and 29, respectively. Like father, like daughter; getting tested for all the same diseases, paying for all the same indulgences. We shift our aching behinds in the uncomfortable linked-metal chairs, wondering what's taking so long, unwilling to stand up and lose our seat. The air is thick with sighs and rustling clothes, and crinkling plastic files full of documents that hold life and death in their pages. We clutch them close to our chests like the attendant nurse would try to run away with our precious data.  

Occasionally someone gets to cut the line.  Anarchy ensues in the doctor's office. The next person goes in. General commiseration and faint curiosity. We all sit up a bit more. Our turn's getting closer, have we gone over what to ask the Doctor? Oddly enough, no-one makes conversation here. A lot of bland silence and a lot of dull staring, that's what the Doctor’s Waiting Room is for. A heavy heart, a ton of regret. What should've been, could've been, would've been if not for diets that failed and “lifestyle changes” that didn’t take root. 

This isn’t one of those Waiting Rooms where desperation takes regular rounds, clogging every molecule of available space, where air is hard to come by, where hopeful eyes watch the closed door to the mysterious room as though it held God (any version) within, where faces had ‘Save me’ writ as large on them as if they were stranded islanders waiting for a search and rescue helicopter. For now, this mysterious room held no pilot, no Oracle. 

All the same, I'm tired of this room. I've seen this same room a hundred times over in a hundred different places with hundred different faces behind the imposing doors labelled Dr. ___(MBBS, MB, and other M- related abbreviations). I'm tired of the smell of lemon-flavoured air freshener poorly masking the chlorine and bleach lurking underneath. I'm tired of the tea and ironically oily banana fritters they sell just down the hall. I watch the Tom and Jerry episode on the TV with my Dad like old times. Number 21. Number 22. These days I'm a little scared at the speed at which life seems to move. But in the Doctor's Waiting Room, time is caught and kept imprisoned, frozen, paralyzed. A deep sigh escapes me, and I settle back in my chair. Six more to go. Have we discussed what to tell the Doctor, Dad? 

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This was a write-up I did after a month of strenuous doctor appointments, where my dad and I would go together to see the same doctor for the same illnesses. Talk about unhealthy patterns recurring in life, huh? To be even more precise, I wrote this on the day after a particularly depressing day when we spent hours and hours at different scanning centers, barely concealed concern and disappointment hindering us from engaging in much ( or any, for that matter,) conversation. [I was watching the one green plant in the room, the generic, soul-dead painting on the wall and the blood red cushions thrown on the brown leather sofa thinking "Wow they sure tried hard to make this place not look like the place where people hung between life and death (sometimes)".] I would like to say that those days are far behind us now but health is not something either of us are wealthy in right now. Which makes me think about all my friends who also are frequent faces in their respective hospitals, and how this generation is headed for certain doom in the foreseeable future. But that's a story for another day. Thanks for reading!