On two different days this week, I spent several hours waiting for it to be my turn.
Well. Not really my turn, but Lou’s turn. On Monday, we traveled down to the East Bay to see my man, Dr. Dong, because Lou hurt his wrist the week prior, and the pain just wouldn’t go away. It seemed very similar to the pinched nerve pain I had in my neck earlier this year, and after Dr. Dong lit my back on fire and fixed my whole self in one magical moment in time, I’ve been a big believer in his treatments!
But if you read my blog on Dr. Dong, then you already know that the good doctor doesn’t speak much English, and, he doesn’t take appointments. It’s a first-come-first-serve situation when you’re looking to get “dong’d” and so even before we left the house, we knew it was going to be a long day. So I guess because I was prepared for the wait — and, because I wasn’t the one in pain this time — I was in the mood to think and observe more than usual.
Just like when I went to see Dr. Dong, there were a lot of people seeking treatment from this man, and every person in the waiting area seemed to be struggling with some kind of pain. Deep pain. You’d never wait for hours upon hours to see a pain doctor if it wasn’t serious, and as I looked around at the seven people who were ahead of Lou in the line-up, I could sincerely see how much pain each person was dealing with, and, I understood in my own very personal way how much hope they were carrying that Dr. Dong would be able to help.
By the time Lou and I had waited for two hours in that jenky and very dingy waiting area, Dr. Dong had only seen two people! But during that time, four more hobbled up people had arrived, and every single person in the waiting area except for Lou and me spoke Chinese. Every now and then, little clusters of chatter would break out, and even without speaking the language, I could tell that the others were trying to work out who was next in line.
There was this blank sign-up sheet hanging on the half-wall that split the room from the waiting area into the treatment area, but no one ever signed in — not even Lou! So basically, it seemed like the only way you could know when it was your turn was based on counting backward from the latest arrivals until you got to yourself. I had already worked it out in my head who was after Lou, but I figured we’d know it was our turn once the last person we’d seen when we first arrived went back for his or her session.
That’s when we’d know we were on deck.
But as we entered into hour three, only one more person had gone behind the half-wall, and I could feel Lou fading. His pain was getting to be unbearable — yet every single person in that waiting room seemed to be in the same boat as my husband. Everyone kept shifting in the tired old chairs in an effort to get more comfortable, but it was obvious that no position changes would be enough to alleviate the pain represented in that waiting area.
I had given up my seat to an elderly Chinese lady who had only recently arrived, and her son (or caretaker person) seemed so appreciative. The lady was so tiny sitting there next to Lou, and I found myself fascinated by how child-like her movements were, yet her body was clearly wracked with age. But after the clock was closing in on another hour of waiting, Lou finally got up to get the key to the men’s room.
And that’s when Dr. Dong came around the half-wall.
His little 5’ frame nearly collided with Lou’s 6’3” frame, but instead of falling over, Dr. Dong reached for Lou’s bad arm and started asking him questions in his broken English. Lou answered all of his questions as he stood just on the border between being in the waiting area and being the treatment area, and as this unexpected exchange with Dr. Dong was taking place, all of the people (like me) who were fully in the waiting area seemed to perk up with great interest.
As Dr. Dong continued to ask Lou more questions, one of the women seated directly across from me started talking in an animated Chinese whisper to the man next to her, and then she looked over at me with what felt like a steely glare. She was definitely before Lou in the mentally-tracked line-up, and I felt like she was trying to remind me of this in fact with her glare. The man she was engaging sounded a little pissy in response to her whispers — and, he also gave me a glance, too, but he quickly looked away.
I smiled weakly at the both of them as I felt myself get all nervous inside because I know for a fact that people in chronic forms of pain often lack the ability to reign in their emotions, and when it started to become clear that Dr. Dong was focusing all of his attention onto Lou — who was definitely not even on deck yet — the tension in the room felt palpable.
So I felt torn.
On the one hand, I was thrilled that Lou had Dr. Dong’s attention!
But on the other hand…I felt horrible about the others who had been waiting longer than us to see this sage old healer…
But because it was happening to us, it felt like we were getting this lucky break, and so I wasn’t going to complain. I mean, we didn’t try to orchestrate this situation — it just happened! We weren’t playing any angles to get ahead, and we were willing to wait like everyone else. But Dr. Dong changed things up, and even though the prickle of the angry stares bothered me, I wasn’t going to point out the proper order of things to the good healer! If he wanted to treat Lou out of order, who am I to stop him?
When the stares started to feel more like daggers, Dr. Dong mercifully led Lou (and me) out of his main office and into a tiny room across the hall where his protege started treating Lou. Per Dr. Dong’s instructions, this junior healer smeared some weird smelling paste on Lou’s wrist, covered it was some cling-film, and followed that up with an arm wrap made from some kind of a white cotton fabric that looked like a strip from a white T-shirt. The junior healer explained to us that Lou’s arm was simply too swollen to treat with fire and ice water (darn), and so all he could do was cover Lou’s arm in this mud and white vinegar mixture, and then give us three bags full of arm-de-swelling tea to take home with us.
Within eight minutes, the wait and the treatment were over, and Lou and I were making our way back outside of the building and away from the angry pain mob waiting just outside Dr. Dong’s treatment area. The line had one less person for the most recent arrivals, and hopefully, the next person was already on his or her way to feeling a little better.
But the whole jumping-the-line experience really left an impression on me.
When you’re waiting for it to be your turn, and someone comes along and helps you jump the line, it feels really great to be you! But when you’re waiting for it to be your turn, and someone comes along and helps someone who is behind you jump the line, it feels infuriating…and it totally sucks to be you.
Because it’s not fair.
There’s an order to things, and when that order gets disrupted — through no fault of your own, or because someone shows favoritism — it just doesn’t sit quite right with me. And even though the favoritism was turned toward Lou this time, I still knew how disruptive it was in the lives of others. The pain each of those patients were feeling was no less horrible for them than Lou’s pain was to him… And their time matters to them the way my time matters to me, and so a line jumper — for any reason — is kind of easy to hate on.
As I said at the top of this post, I had two days of waiting this week — and the second day was yesterday. But instead of a dodgy waiting area in the middle of East Bay’s version of Chinatown, I was waiting in a sterile emergency room at the St. Helena Hospital right in the middle of the California Wine Country. The mud-paste and stinky-ass tea did nothing to help Lou’s arm, and so we decided we better get some different kind of intervention.
And while we did wait for close to two hours to get Lou’s situation checked out and remedied with a pain shot and some Rambo-Strength anti-inflammatories, I couldn’t help but think about those people in Dr. Dong’s waiting area.
