Lemon County: Wait A Moment...

I'm sure I'm not the only person to wonder who first came up with the waiting room thing. You know, you go to your doctor at the pre ordained time, wait to check in, wait to be called for your insurance card, wait to pay your co-payment. And then wait.

Well, not wait so much, but get really ticked off at the TV that has become as ubiquitous as the out of date magazines. Smiling happy people, needing medications from smiling doctors in pristine lab coats, seems to be the program of choice, or it could just be a looping informercial, but you can't help but watch it. Gives you something to do as you pick up the latest virus from the fellow prisoners hacking in your vicinity.

After an hour or so, a smiling person in scrubs, mangles your name in front of the assembled throng, and guides you through the magic door into the non-waiting room area. The air is hushed and still, as you go past the smiling girl at the computer (also wearing scrubs, but a different color) and enter the "little room".

"The doctor will be right with you," the smiling scrub wearer lies and you look for the correct place to sit. The room is three feet by four feet and contains a miniature bed perched up high on a cabinet with paper sheets on a roll. There is also a sink where you can wash one finger at a time, a little cupboard, a chair, a stool and some posters advertising your internal organs.

The chair would be my seat of choice, as the stool has wheels so that the doctor can scoot from one side of the room to the other, and that seems like fun, and, you're not there to have fun are you? But, experience has taught me that they do expect you to climb on to the elevated mini bed, and sit there with your legs dangling.

Blissfully I have not come across TV's in the not-really-waiting-rooms, room but the magazines are the rejects from the actual waiting room, often with crucial pages missing. So you wait.

Then there is a knock on the door, which is weird. Are they assuming that the sight of the elevated mini bed will encourage you to do something socially untoward? But, anyway, they knock, giving you no time to think of an appropriate response and the not-the-doctor, smiling scrubs lady returns.

This creates a false sense of action as your blood pressure is taken and you are asked to lie about your height and weight. "And what do you want to see the doctor for?" you are asked.

There is a good chance that I've forgotten by this time, but I can usually pull something out of the bag, blood pressure is always a good one. "OK then," says scrubs lady, scribbling another secret in the vanilla folder containing all your past secrets, " the doctor will be right with you."

Not so much. You count the floor tiles (12). Look for funny words on the internal organs posters, and finally get your phone out and play Tetris. It grows dark outside, you are tired and hungry, but just as you feel likely to pass out, the door is simultaneously knocked on and entered, and the white coated God (or in my case Goddess) arrives with a big smile and a quick roll around on the wheeley stool.

Thirty seconds later they leave in a blur. Apparently "we" are suffering from stress, not eating right, exercising like a dead person and need a new medication. I know this only because I have a piece of paper in my hand with hieroglyphs on it that only pharmacists can decipher, and a strong sense of having been a very naughty boy.

Can't wait to go home and tell She-who-is-adored that I forgot to ask about the things I went there for!

If you enjoy this hub, please check out my book,

Homo Domesticus; A Life Interrupted By Housework,

A collection of my best writings woven into a narrative on a very strange year in my life.

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Chris