Hospital Waiting Rooms

Hospitals are strange places; there a buzz of constant activity, tension, and mystery going on throughout a hospital's labyrinthe corridors. And, I sue hospitals and their denizens for a living. Both of which combine to make me feel very awkward and ambivalent when I'm in one -- particularly one that seems to generally have its act together, one where it generally seems like things are working the way they're supposed to.

My relative who was taken to a hospital today would feel strange and awkward about my describing the details of her hospitalization on the internet, and out of respect for her feelings, I will skip over the circumstances which caused me to spend half my day the hospital awaiting news of her condition. Suffice to say that I received an alarming phone call late this morning, and dropped everything to wait in a room next to the ER designed for the purposes of providing people like me with a comfortable and comforting environment in which to await word of another person's medical condition. So I'll confine my comments here to a few musings and observations about waiting in a hospital.

Why do people spend hours in a waiting room? Why did I drop everything and rush out of work to go wait in a hospital's lobby? I can't change what the doctors are doing. I can't help. Information trickles out of the treatment rooms at what seems to be a glacial pace. But to not be there (if being there were a reasonable possibility) seems to lack in empathy and humanity. And although I spent a lot of time idly waiting, I was glad to be there and glad to get such information as I could, directly from the doctors and nurses ministering to my loved one.

It was pretty comfortable for me and the other non-patients out there in the lobby -- there were nice chairs, attractive and professional decor, televisions broadcasting sports and news, recent magazines, a large aquarium, and friendly staff with access to the hospital's centralized patient database. There was even a large cafeteria with a good selection of food at reasonable prices. While the food was not what I would call "great," it was a few steps up above the level of "edible." (I also noticed that hospital staff and doctors could buy their food with a scan on a bar code on their name tags, to speed their meal purchases along; I thought that was a very smart thing to set up considering the time and emergency pressures medical staff may be under while in a hospital.)

It was clear that someone had put a lot of thought into creating an appropriate environment for people to wait in. I felt grateful that someone had put such thought and attention to detail into the aspects of the hospital I could see, and it assured me (or at least gave me hope) that similar attention had been put into the medical side of things.

That doesn't mean I'll stop doing what I do for a living, or even hesitate to go after this particular hospital if I find evidence that it made a mistake. The point of doing what I do is to encourage medical providers to not make the mistakes in the first place. Which is what I really want to happen with my relative. Based on what I know now, I can guardedly hope that she will be fine, soon enough, but that does not relieve the anxiety and concern I feel in the meantime.