A Surreal Trip to the Doctor

Let me preface this by saying if we are lucky we’re all going to get old at some point and when I say “old” I’m talking about, well, you can define what the number is.

Anyway I took my mother to a regularly scheduled appointment with her cardiologist Thursday for a routine six-month examination.  She is 91 and in amazing health and if we get her genes my sister, brother and I will be truly blessed.

So we walked into the office a few minutes early and basically all 20 or so seats were filled.  It’s not a very eye-pleasing office and people were jammed in there pretty well.  Many were getting tests done and the receptionist told us we would not have to wait that long for her to see the doctor.

Mom got called to go back into an exam room after about 20 minutes which was not too bad and I was killing the time on my phone, checking emails, Twitter, etc.

At some point I then felt like I was caught up in an episode of the Twilight Zone as at the same time in this very crowded office three people were talking on their cell phone, two were sleeping with one snoring so loud the entire office could hear and another was playing along with the contestants on “The Price is Right” which was on the TV.

Also a couple of people were actually eating, something to do with being there for a while due to testing.  It was surreal.

I was looking around to see if anyone else was as perplexed and somewhat uncomfortable like me and realized that most of the others were engaged in conversation with of course health issues the main discussion.

I don’t know what was getting to me more: the snoring woman or the three phone conversations, two of which lasted about 15 minutes and were loud enough that I could hear just about every word being said.

The white walls were starting to close in on me and I was close to standing up and screaming "get off the phone and wake that snoring woman up” when my mother thankfully showed up and said we were good to go.  She got a great report from her doctor and doesn’t have to go back for six months which means I have plenty of time to figure out who can take her.  (Of course I will).