University of Waiting Rooms

The College of Dentistry

The first waiting room I remember is that of Dr. Stanley Kent, my childhood dentist. His office was in Midtown Manhattan, near Rockefeller Center. The waiting room was at one end of a suite of rooms, including a receptionist’s room, two examining rooms with huge throne-like mechanical chairs for the patients, and a dental lab where someone named Leo made plaster casts of peoples’ mouths. Dr. Kent had his own office at the far end and the door was always closed.

There was an odor in the waiting room that I can still smell. I guess it was a mixture of plaster and teeth being drilled, novocaine and the adhesives for dentures. There was a basket on a table holding keys attached to wooden fobs labeled Men and Ladies. This was 1953. The bathrooms were outside the office suite, down the hall near the elevators, and I much preferred to be there than in the actual waiting room. I felt sick in the waiting room. I always got an upset stomach there. My mother explained to me that my stomach was fine. She assured me there was nothing to be afraid of, that Dr. Kent was a nice man and would not hurt me. And yet …

I learned that fear resided in my stomach, a valuable piece of information to learn at a young age. And I learned that Dr. Kent was most likely nice to my mother, but I could not get past his enormous hands. They were like baseball mitts. There was a small green glass sink next to the throne-like chair with water coming out of a spout shaped like a snake. I was told to spit into it. I knew other people spit into the same sink and that made me feel sick again. Dr. Kent gave me a charm after my appointment, a plastic thingy I could put on a bracelet or a zipper. This was to let me know I had done a good job not throwing up in his sink and also it was his feeble attempt to eradicate my fear of going to the dentist. 

The College of Psychology

In my adolescence I went to a psychoanalyst four times a week. His office, down the block from where I lived, was on the street level of a turn-of-the-century apartment building on Park Avenue and 82nd Street. The entrance to the office was from inside the building rather than from the sidewalk, so four times a week a doorman opened the door to the marble lobby and I marched eagerly to the office of Dr. Mortimer Fromberg Shapiro. I often envied the doorman, because he saw each of Dr. Shapiro’s patients. To my 16-year-old imagination, I thought that must have been more than interesting.

The waiting room was small and had only three chairs. There were magazines on a round table that shared space with a vase of artificial flowers. This was an exciting little room for me. I loved my appointments with Dr. Shapiro and, in fact, often got to the waiting room early. I wanted to see who would come out of his office right before my appointment. I sat in the chair where I would have the best view of the door opening, the patient walking out, and Dr. Shapiro opening and shutting the door. What was this person talking to him about? Why were they coming? How was he helping them? Did he like them more than he liked me? There was a woman ahead of me on Mondays who wore fancy clothes, sunglasses and spiked heels. And on Thursdays, there was a man who left the office before my appointment looking disheveled and defeated; he muttered to himself as he put on his coat. I felt sorry for him. About five minutes would pass and then Dr. Shapiro would open the door and say: Hi, bubeleh, come on in. I was the youngest patient he had ever treated.

Since it was psychoanalysis, I lay on a couch and talked to him about whatever was going through my troubled teenage head. Often I started with the waiting room. Why does that woman get so dressed up to come here? Is she a movie star? Is she more interesting than I am? How long has she been coming? Does she have children? Does she love her husband? Do you know that man talks to himself as he leaves his sessions? Does he have any friends? Is he married? Does he have kids? And so forth … Dr. Shapiro took my questions seriously, though he never answered them. He had a way of making me more interested in why I was asking them than in the answers themselves. What a gift this time was — to let my curiosity go wild in the waiting room and then be able to speak out loud about my fantasies and fears. As I said, I loved psychoanalysis. 

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Many years later, after graduating from college, I lived for a year in Washington, D.C. I had my first real job, I was in an unhappy relationship and I hated the East Coast. So I started seeing a therapist whose office was close to work. The oddest thing: I cannot remember his name, but I remember his waiting room as though it were next door. It was the smallest space ever — really like a closet with one chair and small shelf with magazines on it. No window, no art work, only two doors — one was to enter the waiting room and the other was the door to his treatment room. Let’s call him Dr. Gravis (because he had no discernible sense of humor). Well, Dr. Gravis’s waiting room was wired with a light next to the doorknob going into his actual office space. When the light blinked green, I was to stand up, take one step, turn the door handle and enter his sterile room. I told Dr. Gravis I did not like small spaces and found the waiting room very anxiety-producing. He said nothing. He just looked at me. I told him that I felt almost suffocated in such a small space, with no window or air flow. I asked if I could wait outside in the hall. He said nothing. 

I began to think that Dr. Gravis had more problems than I did. But I decided I needed to face my fear and try harder to deal with the waiting room on my own terms. If he was not going to respond to my discomfort, I was determined to do what I needed to to make my time tolerable in his stifling tiny antechamber. One day when I was there, I saw several large cockroaches skulking along the edge of the carpet. I was deathly afraid of crawling insects. I started sweating and opened the door onto the hallway, holding it ajar with my foot. I kept my eye on the doorknob light and as soon as it flickered green, I flew into his office fearing I would step on the bugs and have to hear a crunching noise. Before I sat down, I let him know that there were cockroaches in his waiting room. My voice was louder and shakier than usual; I was clearly worked up. And again, he said nothing. I was only a few weeks into therapy (if you could call it that) with Dr. Gravis, when I realized that my going to his office was making my life worse. 

Occasionally he commented about one thing or another with a response such as: And how do you feel about that? Or You sound worried. Or What do you see as your options? One day soon after the cockroaches joined me in the waiting room, I exercised my options by saying sayonara to Dr. Gravis. When I left his office for the last time, I felt elated not to ever be in that coffin of a waiting room again. Perhaps that was his aim — to get me to take responsibility for solving my own problems. I went forward under my own agency to end the relationship I was in, to leave the East Coast and to proceed into adulthood. 

The College of Medicine

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, must have hundreds of waiting rooms on their extensive campus of medical buildings and hospitals. Unfortunately, I waited in many of them between 2002 and 2011, accompanying my husband, who suffered with two terrible diseases. If you end up at Mayo, it often means you are struggling with a health condition that has stumped physicians in other medical facilities. And you most likely feel heart-squeezing stress and fear each time you wait to see a specialist or to get an X-ray, scan or blood test. There must be a department somewhere at Mayo whose sole purpose it is to study the welfare of people who find themselves waiting for medical appointments. The warmth and gentleness that I felt in their waiting rooms was unlike any waiting room experience I had ever had. There are no loudspeakers. There is no Muzak. When you check in at each waiting area, you are given a vibrating buzzer and are told that when the doctor is ready to see you, you will feel the buzzer, and a nurse will be waiting for you at the entrance of the treatment area. Personally I felt cared for — as though someone understood the scary medical predicaments my husband and I were in the middle of.

Also, the art collection at the Mayo Clinic is displayed all over the campus, from the Chihuly chandelier in the gigantic lobby of the Gonda Building to the paintings and textiles hung in all the waiting areas. Visually, we were treated to beautiful works of art, confirming for me that William Morris was right when he said: Beauty, which is what is meant by art … is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life. Every time I was there, I was soothed, comforted and supported by what I got to gaze at. It made a world of difference when fear was in my face. In fact, when I moved my private psychotherapy practice to a new location in 2008, I applied what I learned from Mayo. My waiting room is quiet and there are paintings and textiles on the walls (albeit nothing close to the caliber of the art at Mayo, of course) and pottery and blown glass displayed on shelves. 

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The waiting areas at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, make the Mayo Clinic look and feel like a wellness center. People go to the NIH, not for treatment, but rather to contribute to scientific research or to qualify for a clinical trial when all other treatments have failed. Most everyone is saddled with chronic, unrelenting disease; often death appears to be close by. The rooms, hallways and atriums where sick people wait for their appointments are mostly cavernous. Sounds have an echo quality and there is nothing to look at on the walls, other than signage regarding the NIH. Maybe there are portraits of doctors and scientists, but to be truthful, most of the people there are so ill that they are not looking at anything. And their loved ones are too leveled with sadness to notice what’s on the walls. Children with life-threatening illnesses are on stretchers made to look like red wagons and their parents are sunken with sorrow. 

While my husband was in the Hematology lab giving 27 vials of his blood to the NIH for their research, I was in the waiting area. I saw a young man who was totally orange. He was sitting with a woman who I imagined was his wife. He wore a baseball cap; his face was gaunt and his clothes hung from his bony frame. The tone of orange was intense; it reminded me of the Burnt Orange Crayola crayon I colored with as a child. I assumed he was suffering from some type of severe jaundice; perhaps he was dying of liver disease. I watched the orange man and his wife for almost an hour in between trying to concentrate on reading my book. People hang onto life when living does not look possible, I thought. Most likely, at some point there had been a wedding in front of family and friends where they stated in their vows … in sickness and in health. No one ever knows what this promise is really about when they are making it. This man never expected to become orange; this woman never imagined her husband as anything other than healthy and robust. Maybe they would each get the flu or pneumonia, maybe something chronic like arthritis or high blood pressure. No one imagines organ failure — especially before they are old. 

I have thought about the orange man often over the last 10 years. I imagine he died soon after I saw at him at the NIH. I think about how his family must miss him, his young wife now a widow. Perhaps she has remarried, vowing again to stick around through illness and through health. Or perhaps she has not remarried, preferring to do life solo from here on out. To watch someone you love disintegrate — to witness their life diminish before your eyes with nothing you can do to stop it — is what this vow asks and promises. The NIH waiting areas were full of these lessons, these exempla. Every decision comes with risks. Love is always followed by loss in one direction or another. Medical waiting rooms are like classrooms filled with teachers of all ages and colors. 

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If energy could be translated into sound, a surgery waiting room would be filled with a staccato-like, disjointed, atonal hum. While waiting for my adult daughter’s abdominal surgery to be completed one snowy winter afternoon, I felt like I was in a freight car with other nervous people all barreling in the same direction, all waiting for some word of encouragement: the surgery is just getting started, the surgery is complete, you can come see your loved one, the doctor will call you in five minutes … This waiting room was in the basement of a large urban hospital. It was tired, the magazines were ragged and stained, much like the upholstery on the chairs and loveseats. People were pacing between the water dispenser, the coffee and tea station and the television, which was permanently set on a local station proclaiming severe storms and dangerous driving conditions every 15 minutes.

There were posters on the walls and even the ceilings in this waiting room — stock photos of a field of daisies, a sunrise, an ancient fountain in a European town, a time-lapse photo of the stars in a night sky. There was a large one below the television of a very pregnant woman and a little boy tiptoeing to kiss her belly. I think it must have been meant for a waiting room in OBGYN. It somehow looked wrong here. And yet … 

This room was like a living diorama of people dealing with anxiety: someone chewing piece after piece of gum, a woman knitting and talking to herself, everybody checking cell phones obsessively, furtive glances, darting eyes, tapping feet. Everyone in the waiting room loves or at least cares for a human being now unconscious, most likely cut open, in some operating room down the hall. In Europe, these rooms are called operating theaters, which I found myself thinking about while I was waiting to hear the outcome of my daughter’s surgery. We, the people waiting (we could call ourselves waiters, though not in the usual sense of the word), were part of the drama in this theatrical production. Minor characters, perhaps, but essential to the overall arc of the unfolding narrative. 

Anxiety was joined by envy when a family member was called by the worker at the desk, a volunteer no doubt. It was her job to make sure there was coffee made, hot water for tea and to relay messages to waiting family members that their mother/father/sister/brother/son/daughter was now in the recovery area. Often she let them know with a smile that the surgeon would meet with them in the hall in a matter of minutes to let them know how things went. Each time this happened, each time the population in the room shrank, those remaining looked more burdened with the knowledge that their loved one was still splayed open somewhere close by. 

After seeing my daughter and knowing she was in a room and recovering well, I drove home slowly over treacherous snow-covered streets. Everyday there are people in surgery waiting rooms all over the world, I thought. They are pacing, fretting, watching the clock until their loved ones have been sewn up and returned to them from the parenthesis called anesthesia. Reassured, they go home, as do the surgeons, nurses and volunteers at the waiting room reception desks. We are in constantly changing webs of connection. As I turned into my snow-filled driveway, I was thankful my car had front-wheel drive. I thought, Today I waited for my daughter to make it out of surgery; tomorrow I will wait for the snow removal people to come. I fixed myself a late dinner and thought about all those in my little waiting room cohort. I silently wished them a decent night of sleep. Their loved ones were no doubt in a medicated hazy slumber and I wished each of them a speedy return to health. 

The College of Veterinary Science

Being in a veterinary waiting room is much like being in one at a pediatrician’s office. Most of the patients are making loud noises and the adults are cooing, bribing and cajoling to keep them quiet. After all, pets are not only family members, but also are often the glue connecting people to their own vulnerability and empathy. Often vets seem to run late; I suppose this is because there is no telling how cooperative Fido or Tigger is going to be when faced with a thermometer in the rectum or a vaccine injected into a muscle.

When I go to the vet, I get there on time and am prepared to wait for a long while. Cats are on one side, dogs on the other. People with reptiles and birds tend to wait on the edges of the room since neither side is safe for them. I talk to my cat (whom I have placed on a chair next to me, facing away from the dogs) in a low, almost steamy tone of voice. I tell her how wonderful she is, how much I love her, how I will protect her. When do people profess this kind of affection so openly in public — other than at the vet’s office? I smile guardedly at the other cat owners, who are looking furtively at the entrance door ready to protect their feline against overly enthusiastic, barking dogs. The people attached to their dogs are paying no attention at all to the cats. Mostly they are either showing off how well-trained Fido is or how useless it is to try to keep him quiet.

Sometimes when I go to the vet with Olive, my 12-year-old cat, I marvel at the juxtaposition of kittens and puppies with elderly animals — people newly in love with their recently adopted animal and others sitting with the fear of illnesses and of the eventual loss of their elderly long-loved pet. One time recently, I was waiting with several other pet owners. One woman was cuddling her pet rat who was swaddled in a small piece of terry cloth. She was sitting near a woman who was draped over her cat’s carrying case. I asked the rat woman if her rat was sick. He lost his left eye in a fight with a cat, she said sadly. I wanted to put my hands over Olive’s ears, but she was pretty relaxed inside her carrier. The rat woman asked the other cat woman what was wrong with her cat. She got bitten by a dog in a fight and now her leg is infected. With that, she leered toward the canine side of the waiting room. It occurred to me that we love our pets whether they are predators or victims. As I said, waiting for a vet is not dissimilar to waiting for a pediatrician. 

The College of Mortuary Science

I am aware that not everybody has been in the waiting room of a crematorium. But on an astoundingly beautiful winter morning — when the sky could not have been bluer and the sun was showing off — I walked into the Lakewood Cemetery Crematory in Minneapolis. My husband had died a few days earlier after a long and difficult illness. I wanted to be there with him until the very end, so I decided, to the shock of many friends, to be there when his body was cremated.

Beneath the architecturally stunning Lakewood Chapel is their crematory. I entered through majestic iron doors, decorated with original Arts and Crafts designs from the year it was built, 1909. The doors opened to a vestibule with another set of doors leading to one of the calmest rooms I have ever been in. I don’t believe in heaven, but if I’m wrong, this is what heaven’s waiting room would look like. It was long and spacious, lit with original fixtures from the early 1900s. The light was warm and almost pale yellow. I sat down on one of the beautiful settees and felt so comfortable that I almost forgot what was going on in this building. 

The doors to the retort furnaces were on the opposite wall from the sitting area. They were made of glass and steel and I could see movement through them. After several minutes, one of the doors opened and a lovely, kind man approached me. He smiled and introduced himself, sat down on a chair opposite to where I was sitting, and asked me if I had any questions. I almost always have questions, so I did not hold back. I wanted to know where my husband was [he was being held in a room off of the furnace area], if he was in his clothes [he was wearing the pajamas he died in], how hot the furnace gets [1800 degrees Fahrenheit], whether I could go in or did I have to watch through the glass doors [it was up to me], what would happen to his artificial hip [metal does not incinerate and it is sifted out before the ashes are put into a container]. I told this man, whose first name was Arthur, that my husband had been sick for 10 years. Arthur asked me about him, what he did for a living, if we had children. He asked how I was doing, if I had a friend to drive me home [I did]. We talked easily until it was time for me to follow him through the doors to the crematory furnace room. The waiting room had held me, had calmed me until I was ready to do what I came to this building to do. It was the kindest space I have ever waited in, and after I left the building to rejoin the brilliant sunny day outside, I was grateful to a space I would never forget. 

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We think of waiting as lost time, wasted time. But really, it is the same as any other time. The time we spend waiting in traffic is no different from the time we spend at our destination. We are born, and as soon as we are old enough to understand that someday we will die, we begin waiting. We wait to start school then we wait to graduate. We wait to get a job and we wait to retire. We wait for our doctors, dentists, therapists, surgeries; we wait for our cars to be repaired, for our hair to be cut, for the mail to arrive; we wait to get paid, to get married, to get caught. There is so much to learn waiting for anything. Just watch people — and if there are no people, watch yourself, your thoughts and emotions. Listen to what people say to one another and how they sound. It is a curriculum like no other. I swear I have learned more in waiting rooms than I learned in all my years in school. And while I have been waiting for the right ending to come to me for this piece of writing, I watched two cardinals in love on my feeder. I heard my neighbor scold his 12-year-old son for acting like a child. I heard an ambulance siren in the distance and got to think about how fortunate I am to be upright and healthy at this very moment. I also watched the maple tree in the far back of my yard shed its red and yellow leaves. I could almost hear them falling, like omens of what lies ahead.