The waiting room
An older couple sits next to me. They wait. What else? He is wearing jogging trousers and a pullover. She is nervous and keeps telling him what to do, whether he got the wrong socks or the right shoes, whether he should eat more of this and less of that, smile less... or was it "smile more"? She looks like a train wreck herself. The man always answers with “Yes”, “No”, “Don’t know” or a very primitive sound -Määäh-. They had to be somewhere at two in the afternoon. They have been here since ten.
Another older man talks about knowing the right people in the union. Apparently, it helps to have connections. He has been waiting since half past eight.
Behind me, a couple is negotiating how much more of their day they are willing to give away. They convince each other to stay past six. Once you have waited this long, leaving starts to feel like wasting your one and only chance of being someone in life, the chance to talk high about being 10 hours straight in the waiting room at the hospital… shows your breeding…
In the next room, three members of staff talk and giggle. Nobody dares interrupt them. Every now and then somebody tries, and there it is… that look over their small glasses on their noses that screams: Why are you bothering me? I don't begrudge anybody a laugh at work. But from this side of the door, after a few hours, you start wondering whether anybody remembers we are here.
The intercom comes to life now and then. Mostly a man's voice, with a foreign accent (Slavic, I would say). Room three again. Whatever is happening in room three, it seems to be keeping the place in business.
And we keep waiting.
Somewhere between these chairs and the consultation room there must be a line between reliable medical care, organised around what a patient needs, and a business that needs patients to keep coming through. I would like to know where that line is. Preferably before somebody cuts me open. As a patient, you don't really know. That is the whole fucking problem. You can ask questions, read whatever they give you, try to follow the explanation… but eventually you have to trust somebody who knows more than you do. Is surgery the best option? Is it the safest? What happens if we just do as the government does and do nothing but wait? And somewhere behind those questions, another one I would rather not have to ask: how much does each option earn the hospital? In the past two weeks, I have found myself facing the knife twice (and the third was on the way, but I didn’t know about it at the time).
I am still not convinced the first operation was necessary. But I let myself be persuaded. To be sure all the bad tissue was out. To be on the safe side. Of course I wanted to be on the safe side. Who sits in front of a doctor and asks for the dangerous option?
Afterwards, they refused to give me antibiotics. Now there is another operation. I cannot tell you whether antibiotics would have prevented it, but my intuition says they most probably would have. I would like somebody to explain why they weren't given, and why cutting me open again is now the answer. But asking those questions shows only my will to have an argument. The senior doctor (the same one who didn't want to give antibiotics) proposed it without hesitation. "Oh je, that looks bad. Cut him open!" Sometimes, he said, you have to operate several times.
Maybe you do. But it is a much easier sentence to say when it isn't your body. For him, another procedure. For me, more pain, more blood, a larger scar, less tissue. Another stretch of my life organised around a wound.
My friend Mike lost his leg in this institution. I know that doesn't explain my own treatment. It doesn't make the decisions in my case less wrong. But I cannot leave that knowledge outside the consultation room just because it is inconvenient.
Are these people overwhelmed? Too much work, too little time? Is anybody getting the chance to sit down and think a case through, or are they all caught in a rapid fire of problems that need to be dealt with before the next one arrives? Shoot and pray?
I don't know which possibility bothers me more. That money influences the decisions, or that everybody is so busy keeping the place running that nobody has time to consider what all this running is doing to us. I don't need a doctor to promise that nothing will go wrong. I need an explanation I can understand. I need to feel that the next step has been thought through, that somebody remembers there is a person attached to the tissue.
Instead, I sit here trying to work out whether I am being looked after or simply moved along.
The couple next to me has missed whatever they had planned for two. The man with connections is still here. Behind me, they have agreed to keep waiting.
And I catch myself thinking that next time I would rather die at home. What has to happen to your trust before that starts sounding like an option?
