Waiting Room

The lab at this hospital is crowded most mornings, and so it is today, notwithstanding the inclement weather outside.  There is a number-dispensing machine in the waiting room, and newcomers are instructed by a sign posted on the wall to take a number so that their wait time will be shortened.  It is difficult to understand the logic of this instruction — taking a number does not in fact shorten the wait.

The patients in the waiting room range in age from their twenties to their eighties, and in ethnic diversity they appear to cover the entire demography of the Great State of California. They are there to have their blood tested, for whatever reason their personal physicians may have decreed that a blood test is needed.

There is a television set hung on a bracket at the end of the room farthest from the receiving windows, where three receptionists, each in her own window with a small privacy screen separating them, periodically call out the numbers that the waiting patients hold in their hands.  

The patient whose number is called then heads towards the designated window where he or she delivers the slip of paper from the doctor to the receptionist, is asked a couple of questions to confirm his or her identity and/or insurance coverage.  Once the formalities are complete, the patient is instructed to sit down and wait some more.

The television is tuned to a station which has a morning variety show hosted by a pretty blonde woman and a dark-haired man with a winning smile and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of quips.  The quips and the banter cause the audience in the television studio to burst into silent laughter, silent because the volume on the TV is set to mute.  This is so as not to interfere with the workings in this hospital waiting room and the sequential calling out of the numbers, and the calling out by the lab technicians of the names of those whose paperwork has already been processed and may therefore proceed to another room where the blood samples are drawn.

Among the twenty or so people in the waiting room, only one seems to be paying any attention to the television.  For all the entertainment value that the TV can provide for the waiting patients, it might just as well not have been there at all.  The remainder of the people are either reading outdated magazines (three-month-old copies of "People" or "The Smithsonian" or "Cosmopolitan"), or staring at nothing in particular (the old gentleman with the red socks does this), or watching the door anxiously in anticipation that the next number or name called will be their own. A couple of them sit with their eyes closed.

The next lab technician to appear calls out a name.  It is a Spanish name, and the technician, who is from Sri Lanka, has some trouble pronouncing it.  No one responds after she has tried to say the name three times, pronouncing it differently each time. Then, as she is about to abandon the prospective patient for another, a Hispanic man in his forties jumps out and says to please wait a moment.  He stumbles outside, and immediately returns pushing an old man in a wheelchair, who wears a baseball cap with the bill pulled down almost to his nose. It is clear that he is the father of the man pushing his wheelchair.  The Sri Lankan technician greets them, and leads them into the next room.

And then another technician appears, and another name is called.  And so it goes on for the better part of the morning.