Waiting for the word

The hospital waiting room is its usual conglomeration of patient impatience. Ipod buds in ears, but not really heard. Perfunctory attention to the mindless television morning show. Laptops voraciously seeking the wireless connection so that someone can stare blankly at the screen. Lively chit chat thinly veneering nervous apprehension. Newspaper pages turned but with primary attention given to nurses weaving in with reports; pages that will eventually need to be turned again. Or not. Everybody is engaged in some distraction, but no one is finally distracted.

I have often thought it easier to be the patient than the loved one standing by - waiting, praying, listening, worrying, and watching loved ones in pain. Here the red numerals on the wall clock clicks over at glacial speed. Here the coffee is free, but drinking it is more something to do than taste or enjoy.Now they have pagers that flash or quack or vibrate or do all three to signal the end of the wait. Like at a restaurant, as though there is something delectably delicious just beyond the flashing buzz. But clutched here all around the room, these merely signal the beginning of waiting of a different sort. Waiting for waking. Waiting for healing. Or worse.

Perhaps the distractions here are less to help pass the crawling time, and more to avoid the agony that is the helplessness in this room, on this useless side of those all-important swinging doors.

So here we all sit. Waiting, most of us. Praying, some of us. All of us, whatever else we may be busying ourselves with, watching the swinging of those doors; anxious for them to swing in our direction.

And finally exhaling when they do.

"It will be an hour or so before you can see your mother," the nurse reports to the kids with whom I am waiting, "but the surgery is over and went fine."

Finally.

Now, where is that newspaper I read two or three times awhile ago?