by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson
There’s something unsettling about hospital
waiting rooms. The very air is saturated with thick and not always pleasant
emotions. I’m here while a dear elderly friend has a fairly minor day surgery,
waiting to take her home, but some of my waiting room companions are not so
lucky. There are several clumps of people waiting with me, but there is no
friendly interaction between us. I’m sure that’s not from any sense of dislike
or snobbishness; on the contrary, I think it is a manifestation of focusing on
what is important to them - their loved one, some of whom are having
not-so-minor day surgeries.
And that’s the way it should be. Everyone’s
attention and energy should be on their loved ones. There are other times for
chatting with strangers, or caring/praying for others who have problems, but
when it is your loved one whose flesh is under the scalpel, some familial
selfishness is understandable.
I’m here alone, for my elderly friend has no
local relations, and we have been close for decades, so to help the time pass I
am shamelessly eavesdropping. Not that I couldn’t even if I didn’t want to; the
waiting room is small, and it can’t be helped.
Everyone here has a story; one group’s uncle is
having a hernia repaired; another’s sister is having benign cyst removed;
another’s mother is having a badly ingrown toenail attended to; one patient is
a child having her tonsils out; my friend is having a cataract removed. None of
them are life threatening, or even very scary procedures, nothing like what is
seen in emergency rooms and major surgical suites every day, but still... the
idea of a human body - a beloved human body - being invaded with scalpel or
laser or Heaven only knows what is still terrifying.
I know that a viable story could be generated
from every story in this waiting room. Human experience is the genesis of all
stories, but sometimes they come too close to your particular bone. It’s one
thing to make up fanciful or grittily realistic tales about what happens to
someone and another to think about what is happening to a loved one at the
moment. Later, perhaps, when all is happily resolved, the emotional memory can
be taken out and reshaped to make a story, but most definitely later. Not now,
when the stomach is clenched and the mind full of possible horrors.
Someone said of writers that everything is all
research to us, and that’s true. Most things that happen to us will sooner or
later turn up in some form in a story. There’s no rule, however, that this
involuntary research has to be pleasant.
