Waiting

This was written during an excruciating three-hour wait at LAC+USC. The font's bound to be screwy because this is all from my phone, so happy reading.


There are five of us in this bland room whose walls were once pink but are now a kind of tired, sagging bloody beige with the scuffed wallpaper peeling of in chunks and hastily plastered over by pieces of white tagboard. The light is two dim to even be considered fluorescent. They must be bygone relics of the time of incandescence.

There are four people at the table. Two male. Two female. I'm standing off to the side simply because there only four chairs at the table. There's a stack of chairs in the corner that reaches up above my head, but I can't be bothered with walking all the way across this tiny room to set one down at the two tables whose edges don't quite meet.

The swinging doors open, and now there are four.

It irks me that one table is a dark mahogany with darker legs while the other is a pale, bleached beige. Did no one think to match fake wood types? None of the four chairs match either, though the ones in the large stack in the corner on the far side of the room are faceless in their hard, black, plastic unity. I half expect the floor tiles to suddenly change from speckled off-white to some psychedelic rendering of Travolta's dance floor. Flashing lights included.

There is a blue streamer trapped in a ceiling panel. It's one of those cheap, pre-wrinkled ones that comes in huge rolls that are never fully used. It adds a much-needed splash of color to the pink room.

The whiteboard is something else completely. On it, demanding immediate attention, is an anterior view of the human knee with all the parts labelled. MCL. PCL. ACL. LCL. I feel last year's AP Biology kicking in. Around it are scribbles: calculations for a CrCl (Chromium Chloride?), which is to be administered (according to a splattering of blue scribbles) at 54 liters per hour (or 90 milliliters per minute); neater, bluer scribbles are boxed in on the left, but all I can make out from this side of the room are ESTROGEN and PROGESTERONE written just like that in all caps; there are arrows pointing either up on down, with the word "risk" after each of them, and I see words like OVARIAN CA and ENVIRONMENTAL CA; at the very bottom is a large RISKS which is also underlined rather crookedly, followed by MI/STROKE and VTE/CUT. I come to the conclusion that this is the room where people come to die. There are just too many risks.

A girl screeches outside (or are those just the wheels of some poorly-maintained piece of death-defying machinery?).

Above the board, in foot-high capitals, a sign reads CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE, followed by a large, yellow smiley face.

The yellowed clock face follows the red hand around.

Below that is a long double row of X-ray backlights. There are four individual panels and eight clips to each panel. Thirty-two lives could be decided here all at once. Strangely, though, there is only one socket for the four panels. Perhaps that will cut down on the death rate.

There are five of us again now.

A minuscule television sits on top of a rolling trolley by the X-ray backlights. A sign is taped over the screen: THIS TV/DVD BELONGS TO BREAST/MAMMO DEPT AT CLINIC TOWER followed by a name and a phone number. Women are so possessive. It may be just my perspective, but the trolley seems a little bent out of shape.

I just realized that the doors are blue. A kind of washed-out blue, though, not like the forced dying pink-beige of the walls.

The blue doors bang open again, but after a fluttering of paperwork, there are still five of us. Waiting.

The white trash can in the corner has a serious design flaw. It's base is less than a quarter the size of its lid. It is an inverted trapezoid. What will happen when the step-lever is stepped on? The trash can will tip over, that's what, held upright only by the weight of the stepper's foot. What will happen when the stepper steps off the step-lever? Well, the trash can will wobble precariously for a few moments, and one of two things will happen: 1) the trash can will remain standing, or b) the trash can will fall over with a crash and everyone will die for a moment.

There are no red emergency sockets in here. But I suppose this is just a conference room. So there would be no need for life-support machinery in here. But what if the blue doors somehow got stuck and we were trapped in here forever with only the minuscule television with the sign taped over the screen as our only form of entertainment? What if the only thing in the DVD player was of someone's mammogram? Would we watch it for the rest of our lives in this dying-pink room? What if there was a tumor in the mammogram? Would we be able to tell? Would be able to say, right then and there, as we were dying in this conference room that the person whose mammogram we were watching was going to die? If the lights went out and the emergency generators failed, would we sit alone in here and take comfort in knowing that someone out there was dying too?

The atmosphere in here is still a sullen silence sullied by the screeching of the girl (or machine) in the hall beyond the blue doors.

Absurdly, I realize that the telephone on the wall opposite matches the dying-pink of the walls. It's as if they died (or are dying-I'm no expert on the death of inanimate objects) together.

It's strange, the symmetry I now find in this room. The black floor trim matches the black of the non-emergency electrical sockets, some of which are upside-down like the exposed electrical cord next to me which is a sad tan-ish color like the hinges on the blue door, which is the only blue in the room except for the blue scribbles on the board that dictate risk and chromium chloride or the blue streamer hanging from the ceiling panel that is a much happier blue than either the door or the scribbles, but not as happy as the yellow smiling face after CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE, which only emphasizes the dying-pink-ness of the walls.

Raised silver panels, also trapezoidal in shape, run waist-high around the room. I do not know what they are for and it irks me.

I'm still standing next to the waist-high silver trapezoidal panel. I think it might be electrically charged. Shiny silver things have a habit of being electrically charged.

None of this makes any sense.

Fifty-nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, I have gone through a decade-old issue of the American Journal of Nursing and read a particularly unenlightening article about bowel sounds. I now know that there are four abdominal quadrants and that gastrointestinal motility returns in the small intestine after two to four hours, to the stomach in three days, and to the colon in six days. Bowel sounds are heard through the stethoscope, and the recommended listening time per quadrant is five minutes, for a total of twenty minutes of bowel-listening. This is why bowel sounds are being called into question as a means of patient diagnosis. They take too long.

I've given up. I'm sitting down in a chair now. At the table. I feel as if my legs do not belong to me anymore. Can I listen for leg sounds?

I just stepped on the step-lever of the trapezoidal trash can. It's a great deal heavier than it looks. It didn't even wobble.