Time creeps in a waiting room

I spent the day in hospital waiting rooms Thursday accompanied by many of my wife's family and the breath-sucking anxiety that goes with hospital visits. In the unrelentingly long wait for news from the surgeons, I watched a horde of people in the same position as we were — waiting, waiting, waiting for some news of a loved one recently wheeled away on a gurney. Hope for the best outcome is written on faces beside the fear of the worst. This high-soaring and death-diving of emotions leave human bodies exhausted, and the exhaustion is evident in every small gesture.

The anxiety hacks at fragile emotions emotions like a pick axe in hard clay, cleaving out chunks of well-mannered facades. A woman in the fourth day of her mother's stroke ranted like a mental case over being asked whether her mother had a living will. We had never met but were thrown together in the tight quarters of a hospital waiting room, so I heard her angry accusations. It's probably a routine question asked of all patients, I thought, but I would not risk the woman's wrath by saying so.

While the ill populate the secret recesses of hospitals' labyrinths, the loved ones, kin and friend, sit idly in public showcases — waiting rooms where strangers crowd together, avoid eye contact and watchfully observe the way others handle anxiety. They scurry in animated urgency while others doze in exhaustion both physical and emotional. A hundred strangers coped with the wait last Thursday, scattered along a corridor longer than a basketball court. They read, they napped, they talked, they watched. But mostly they waited while beyond the wall of windows, the morning sun turned to midday and then to late afternoon glare. Tempus fugit? No, time crept so slowly that clocks and time lost their meaning. And as time slowed down, anxiety spiraled upward.

The hospital offered newspapers and magazines, television, hot coffee, comfortable chairs to ease the discomfort of the people waiting. But the hospital could not bring restore time's normal, 60-seconds-to-the-minute pace. The day stretched longer, the chairs became less comfortable, the reading no longer diverted attention. As the sun neared setting, the waiting ended for some, and the crowded space opened up before the day of waiting finally ended.