It’s elementary, my dear Daring One, but you will need to wait 90 minutes to be seen.
Rumor has it that a new Peds office is going up 3 inches from my front door sometime in the next 3 days to 10 years (the grapevine is amazingly inaccurate, I find). So I wanted to check out the doctor who is rumored to be moving here.
Magoo’s had a cough for 2 months, so I thought, “That’s a good excuse to see this guy. What the heidi-hay? Why not spend an hour in a germ-infested flu chamber?”
Scene:
In the waiting room, a poor lady loses her marbles. She’s pulled her kid out of school, gotten a babysitter for the others and she’s been waiting forever. It turns out they double-booked the doctor and we are scheduled to go in at the same time.
She calls someone on her cell phone and freaks out.
She talks to the receptionist.
I try to lighten the mood. I guess I’m not that funny.
She calls someone on her cell phone and freaks out.
She talks to the receptionist – LOUDLY.
We all feel bad for her but….WOW!
She calls someone on her cell phone and refers to me, saying something like, “Of course SHE’S not freaking out. Back in the days when I just had little kids at home, I could spend all day in the doctor’s office and it would be no big deal.”
(This is funny. I guess now SHE has a life or something. Phew! I’m sure glad I don’t.)
I’m actually not freaking out because it won’t change anything, people are giving the marble-less one crazy cukoo-eyed looks, my kids are enjoying the fish tank, and I feel strangely that I’m getting my comeuppance for my tardy laster-time at the doctor’s office.
This is a different doctor, a different office, and a different practice, but aren’t they all somehow in cahoots? If they put a big fat red flag on my file in one office, I bet alarms are going off in doctors’ offices all over the state when they see my number on the caller ID. This woman is a late-ish person who must be punished. And so I wait.
After an hour and a half, they call me back first, even though babysitter-can’t-keep-the-kids-anymore-her-daughter-is-missing-phonics-cell-phone lady arrived before me. Her mouth flops open and she makes a sound like, “Gahgk!” and shakes her head. I beg for mercy. I beg them to take her back first.
She softens, her face returns to normalish and she tells me it’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for her. That is sad.
The reception staff and the entire lobby (seriously, the fish and furniture included) breathe a collective sigh of relief.
I think the doctor, who turned out to be a freaky-genius mastermind of medicine, apologized approximately 43 times for the wait and proceeded to pace back and forth asking questions about my family and the state of our health.
The interview ended with a pause, a clasping of hands and then, “I have a theory, and if you’ll permit me to look in your daughter’s ears, I predict that her round of antibiotics has not worked, that her ear infection is still there and that your son and husband (not present) have sinus infections.”
By Jove, he was right!
As I left, the nurse thanked me for my patient’s patience and laughed that they would put a gold star on my chart. I stopped dead in my tracks. “No. Seriously. Please put a gold star on my chart. It would mean a great deal to me.”
She could tell I meant it.
She said she would.
I will be checking.
