In the waiting room...
I’m a very reliable person. So it was no surprise to me when I was asked to be the responsible adult to drive and look after a surgery outpatient that I so happened to marry many years ago. What was a surprise to me was how hard it was to pass the time while waiting for the surgery to be done.
I was actually excited to spend some time in the waiting room. It was the perfect excuse to turn on my “out of office” auto-reply and dig into a real page-turner.
So there I was, getting into some real good character development, when I had to take my first break to figure out why on Earth the older gentleman sitting next to me insisted on clearing his throat every 20 seconds. It was a classic case of “dad-noises.” Every dad has some specific sound he makes for the sole purpose of annoying his children. Some go with the extra loud yawn; others try to suck food out of their teeth. This guy was a throat clearer, and it totally consumed me.
Questions raced through my head. Is it helping anything? Is that why he’s getting surgery? Does his wife not notice? Can he market himself to fraternities as the world’s most annoying drinking game?
Now my auditory senses were on high, and I started noticing all the sounds around me – specifically the music that I confirmed was piped throughout the whole surgery center. The first song was the 1968 gem “Stand By Your Man,” followed up by Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” So in the middle of all this high-tech gadgetry was music you’d expect to hear when you open the door to a townie bar with a dirt floor and everyone turns their heads at you when you walk in.
Then my head had more questions: Who chose this music? Is it the surgeon’s choice? Is my dad operating on my wife? Has my wife ever noticed my dad is a food-in-tooth sucker?
I had to get out of the waiting room and explore the hospital, stat.
I made my way to the pharmacy and was waiting for a prescription to be filled when off in the distance I spied a gift shop that would certainly serve as a fine time-killer. I have (yet another) quirk – I have to buy souvenir T-shirts whenever they’re offered, and it has grown in to a full-blown addiction. I have to go out of my way in any city I’m in to find a shirt to prove I’ve been in Faribault.
So I hurried myself to the gift shop and was looking around for the T-shirt section when I realized I was an idiot standing in the middle of a medical supply store trying to act naturally. The nice employee, knowing that people only go into medical supply stores for very specific reasons, asked if she could help me find anything. To which I promptly responded, “No thanks, I’m just browsing.”
I might as well have just said, “No, just wanted to check out the latest and greatest in the bedside drainage industry.” Or, “No, I just always like to take a peek at leg-bag systems whenever afforded the opportunity.”
I hung around for a few minutes to make it appear that I didn’t actually expect to find a souvenir T-shirt at a medical building and then bolted back to the waiting room to serve my penance for my dunderheadedness.
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