Doctor’s Office Entertainment – How to Make Waiting Easier

Doctor’s Office

When you get to be my age you spend a lot of time visiting various physicians. I go to doctors for my eyes, my feet and every part in between. It’s not that I’m sick all the time, thankfully I’m not. It’s just the maintenance of getting older keeps me running from one appointment to the next.

Think of your aging body like a car. The minute you drive it off the lot you begin to depreciate. Over the years you get routine tune ups but as the years roll by these visits to the repair shop (doctor’s office) become more and more frequent (and more expensive).

Navigating the medical maze isn’t easy and it’s always time consuming. What it usually is NOT is entertaining. Most of us immerse ourselves in our cell phones but after so long even technology can’t keep our attention. Sometimes we just sit and endure.

When people spend hours together in a waiting room they begin to develop a sense of camaraderie. After all, we’re all suffering the endless ticking of the clock together so we start to bond, or at least two of the ladies in the waiting room with me did today. I kept my nose in my cell phone and tried to mind my own business.

At first they discussed various family members (they weren’t related and in fact had just met today) who had died from lung cancer. This was after they had both been outside for a smoke. Then they began talking about people they knew who had other medical issues.

“I had a friend who was born with two wombs,’ said one lady. “She gave birth to her first child out of one womb and then the next time she got pregnant she gave birth out of the other one. After that they took one womb out.”

I thought it best not to ask if she got pregnant again. That would have brought me into their circle of conversation and by this time I was fairly sure I wanted to remain on the sidelines.

“My great-grandma had six toes on one foot,” the other lady said.

Okay, I’m thinking, this is not anywhere nearly as strange as the two womb story.

I was wrong.

“She got the toe cut off, put it in a jar and set it on the mantle.”

I just about fell out of my chair.

She continued on, “I remember walking by it when I was a little girl and begging her to hold me up to where I could see the toe in the jar.”

At this point I had to leave the waiting room and go out in the hall.

Everyone has interesting relatives who march to the beat of a different drummer. And lest anyone think I am making fun of these two ladies, I am not. They made sitting in the waiting room a lot more interesting. I just had a really hard time trying to imagine someone’s toe in a jar on the mantle, but hey, it was her toe. If she wanted to put tiny antlers on it, have it mounted and hang it on the wall that’s her right.

This incident reminded me of something that happened years ago, another moment that left me speechless. I had gone in the sheriff’s office to pay taxes and my sister-in-law happened to be in there paying hers. There was a line and she was talking to a gentleman behind her. I don’t know why but suddenly he told her he had a glass eye. The next thing I know he had popped the eye out and held it in his hand to show it to us.

What do you say at times like that? I guess when you don’t know what to say or do you walk out in the hall until you can compose yourself.

I learned one thing from today’s experience. If I ever go in someone’s house and there is a jar on the mantle you can bet I’m not going anywhere near it.

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