How to have"Fun" in the Hospital Waiting Room.
Okay, I admit the word "fun" is a bit of a reach.
So…there comes a time for all of us where you find yourself hanging around a hospital for some reason. And when I say “you” I mean “me.” since I am in the middle of a time such as this.
When my husband went in to get some “stents” inserted in his plugged arteries, I was directed to the waiting room where I sat, assessing my options for ways to move through the nervousness, the fretfulness, the worriment, the disquietude and all the other synonyms for “anxiety” that can be found on thesaurus.com.
The best answer I could come up with, based on my personality, was “Hey—maybe you can distract yourself by trying to write a piece about hospital waiting rooms. There must be things to say that will be at least faintly amusing.”
This is that piece.
Before I begin, perhaps I should explain what a ‘stent’ even is since you probably have to be in the correct demographic to be on speaking terms with them. If that is you, you will find that once you kick your way past middle age, the word ‘stent’ starts to surface in casual conversations at regular, if unexpected, moments. I never heard of them until 1988, when I was 40 and my father had an angioplasty. And it wasn’t until I googled them literally one minute ago that I realized that the late 80’s were the very start of stents being made available to the clogged artery public. Before that, they used to insert a balloon. And before that, they crossed their fingers and hoped that eating fewer eggs would do the trick. So far RFK isn’t reversing course on this progress but I guess we need to give him time.
Nowadays this stent insertion surgery is considered safe and pretty common. And the procedure is uncomplicated enough that the patient doesn’t usually even have to spend the night. In fact, when the topic was first suggested, we were instantly able to think of three people we knew who already had a stent and seemed to be living a normal happy-enough life. So we quickly contacted them and the result was a virtual FESTIVAL OF STENTS!
ANYWAY…Now that I have dragged you further into the magical world of stents than you had any intention of going, I will now present the one and only waiting-room piece I was able to write under the circumstances.
HOW TO PASS THE ANXIETY-FILLED TIME IN A HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM.
Order a big cup of something or other and set up a sad little work station. Pretend that even if whatever you ordered contains one million calories, which it definitely does, the usual rate of burning calories produced by anxiety when sitting in a waiting-room is two million an hour.
2. Now let’s move on to your first challenge: See if you can predict how many laps the most restless person in the room is going to complete once he has decided to start doing ‘waiting-room laps’.
I predicted SEVEN. He did SIX. 3. Once that excitement has subsided, time to head out to the hall to see if there is any thing of interest out there. And huzzah! Right outside the waiting room is a glossy two-tiered display of twenty framed photos of the men and women on the hospital Board of Directors. This brings us neatly to our next challenge: With the help of NO information at all, look carefully at each of the photos and see if you can manufacture a reason to pick a favorite.
Board of Directors extra credit challenge: Having now accomplished the seemingly impossible, see if you can find a way to explain your reason for making this selection.
I have always been a big fan of The Marx Brothers. It was exciting to run into their littlest known member. 5. Moving ahead, it is now time to make a visit to the single gender restroom at the end of the hall. This is where you will confront your next challenge: Before you exit, see if you can find something inside the room that would make a good name for a punk band
This should also definitely be the name of their Greatest Hits album. 6.Your next challenge will involve some ridiculously careful scrutiny of the waiting room. Your task is to pretend that YOU are the hospital-waiting-room designer whose job it is to select the fabric that will be used as the movable room separator curtains for patients undegoing surgery. There will be A TON of these curtains ordered so you will want to pick your fabric carefully. Knowing that, which fabric would you chose after you have apparently decided that your goal is to dampen the spirits of every cardiac patient who looks at them?
BINGO! These poorly drawn gray-on-gray room separator curtains are a good example of a graphic design that should never have even been in the running. Even plaid would have been a more spiritually energizing choice! Anything with a little color! Were they on sale because there were so many of them left unpurchased in the warehouse? DISCUSS. 7. The next challenge continues to examine the choices the waiting-room- designer made in an attempt to analyze whatever they had instead of good artistic judgment: Looking around the room carefully, what piece of decor do you see that would have been soo much cheerier if it had just been alive?
Correct! It’s no surprise that the two best seats in the house for viewing this polyvinyl grass spectacle remain empty. 8.Moving ahead, now see if you can find a theoretically whimsical piece of room decor in the form of a 3D game that I am willing to bet not one person over the age of three has ever laid their hands on.
Excellent choice. 3-D Tic Tac Toe. It reverberates with the echoes of a mom saying “Travis, put that X down. You’re going to break it. I said DO NOT play with that O. Put it back. Here. Look! I brought your ipod. Come look at this video of a cement mixer truck.” 9. Now for your next challenge, I want you to get up and...what’s that? The surgery is done? And I can go visit with the patient! Now THAT is some cheery good news that even a sadistic room decorator can not ruin.
And so we say good bye to the waiting-room, filled with the personal hope that we do not have to spend any more time here again. Ever.
PS;
The patient received a total of five stents. And he is looking and feeling good!
Fun fact:the only known footage of Lemmo is a bit part in 'Duck Soup'.He played an insurance salesman that loses his s*** when Harpo pretends to fall asleep during his spiel to Groucho.The scene was later cut,and the footage was retrieved by a sharp eyed gaffer.It resurfaced at an auction in Van Nuys sometime in the late 80s and sold for $25 to a retired soda jerk.
My all-time favorite waiting room story. I was once in the ER waiting room with a badly sprained ankle. There was an out-of-control six year-old, running around making noise and being a general nuisance. At one point, he ran up to the big swinging doors where the doctors push the gurneys through and as he ran directly in front of the door, BAM, the doors flung open, sending the kid flying about 5 feet backwards. Waiting room erupted in laughter and applause. (Chef’s kiss.)