The truth about waiting

My love affair with hospital waiting rooms over the last decade.

Not even close to the grimmest waiting room I’ve ever been in. Photo by smallbox on Unsplash

We spend a great chunk of our lives waiting. Trains. Birthdays. Mr Right. Usually when we speak about waiting, it’s through the lens of its evil twin: queuing. One of my most loathed British tropes – posted almost hourly on Instagram accounts named things like JollyGoodBrits or KeepCalmAndEatCake – is how much we love to queue. Of course we don’t. Nobody does. And queues exist in pretty much every other country. I refuse to see queuing as an art from, or a cute cultural quirk particular to Gammon Island. It’s more a tedious, buzz-killing menace that hoovers up our precious minutes on this spinning rock. But what about when we’re not lining up at bus stops, or checkouts, or outside the Hammersmith Apollo for a night of music delivered by the worst speakers this side of a clapped-out ice cream van?

Given how long we spend lingering in them, other than the architects of the earliest grand railway stations or Harley Street doctors, few have paid much attention to the rooms we’re forced to wait our turn. Waiting areas are usually soulless, unloved, with flaking decor and disagreeable seating and lighting so unsympathetic you’d think your ex’s new boyfriend had rigged it up especially for your arrival. I don’t talk about it much, but my partner had a very serious brush with cancer about a decade ago, so I’ve spent many a quiet hour in various waiting rooms anticipating consultations, operations, and the annual checkups that take me back to the warm, yet emotionally distant, arms of institutionalised, organised hanging around.

Waiting rooms fascinate me because there is no option but to be fascinated by them. Seething resentment will not accelerate your exit.

Although almost all commonly awful, there is variety in the ways a waiting room’s creators and administrators attempt to drain your every last drop of energy. I can’t help but find charming the many laminated signs of different ages, their fonts and vernacular particular to whichever chief receptionist had the place in a headlock at that time. The brash posters acting as infomercials for other, even less glamorous diseases – their tone set to easy mode and condescension ramped up to eleven to work as many last nerves as possible. The hospital lingo which is never explained to you, but you gradually start to unravel, the horrors of lived experience your only glossary. The receptionists who vary wildly in aptitude and disposition but, I choose to believe, all mean well – ones in cancer hospitals tend to be sunnier than their counterparts in your local GP surgery but you do encounter the occasional gatekeeper who channels a Ceaușescu.

One of my favourite waiting room staples, now mostly lost to the post-Covid desire for hygienic, cheerless minimalism, was the dog-eared magazines that betrayed the reading habits of the hospital staff and volunteers. Many an epic, oppressive monolith of an afternoon was atomised into pleasurable, frivolous seconds thanks to flicking through a magazine about hairstyles or renovating a country cottage using only one private income and a legacy from a long dead great aunt! Pre-covid, there was a tea trolley too, wheeled in by a volunteer powered by hairspray and a ceaseless smile, complete with subsidised Crunchies and magazines as yet unsullied by a trillion thumbprints. (Outpatients has its own café and even a secondhand bookstore – the apex of waiting-room chic – to distract from the two-hour wait.)

And there are the patients. Specialised hospital waiting rooms are like the murder wing at Pentonville – you know what everyone else is in for. Up in Imaging, its CT scans and MRIs to the left, ultrasounds out the other door. A beep and a leap out of the seat tells you they’re next on the blood test production line. There’s a comforting lack of the curiosity you might otherwise enjoy in, say, a waiting room at Clapham Junction, picking apart someone’s choice of luggage or wondering where on earth someone could be going at 2pm on a Wednesday with a cardboard cutout of Michael Flatley. There is, usually, in the cancer hospital waiting rooms, a serenity about the patients themselves. A television plays ITV1 on mute, with subtitles, and those early enough to snare a forward-facing chair look at it with an assured blankness, while others doomscroll or stare out at the rest of the room as if concentrating on a Magic Eye painting galaxies away. The problem is that patients are seldom alone – in fact, when they are, it is all the more heartbreaking – and bring chaperones. Often they’re spouses displaying levels of devotion ranging from obsessive, undying love to the icy indifference of someone jet-washing squished bluebottles off their windscreen. Sometimes it’s other relatives or plucky pals whose regular stoicism deserts them for wide-eyed, feverish panic when confronted by the realities of spending the next four hours staring at a fish tank or a sign that says, “if you’ve been sitting there longer than half an hour and we haven’t called you, let us know”.

I’d like to go on record as a self-proclaimed exemplary sidekick in a waiting room – my boyfriend would have the final verdict, of course – but many others really like to f•ck with the hospital waiting room’s ambient karmic chill. They blast out TikTok, loudly confirm hair appointments, FaceTime friends, turn Tetris up to noise levels that would register on the International Space Station and generally remind you that most people have no idea to behave in public. Obviously, lengthy appointments mean they collide with life admin that won’t take no for an answer. And the thing is, you can’t get mad, because you shouldn’t get mad – an argument in a waiting room where some souls are saved and others are lost can have no winners. There is hope here, and optimism, but it can be frightening too. So when observed, I find it’s best to smile, even if I’m painting it on; there are others with far more reason for a stony face, and everyone deserves pleasant scenery.

I don’t think anyone would call me a patient person, generally. My tendency to wish away time to get to the good stuff may be my undoing one day. But these waiting rooms have taught me a lot about patience in the moment, and observing the behaviour of other people and. . . just accepting it. After all, we’re all there for the same reason, and if these people are going through what you have already experienced, then a chiding remark from a stranger three seats away won’t elicit an epiphany, it’ll crush them further, and sit on your chest too, and turn a bad day terrible. I’ve learned, in these rooms and beyond, to be more patient and generous among those temporarily lacking social graces. Irritation is a combustible energy and doesn’t drive you forward. Anwyay, usually, the spirit of the silent, patient majority reaches the antagonists by osmosis and they start to calm themselves.

When you’re free from the confines of that airless room, you can both decompress, laugh about the mardy old man who told someone to ‘shift out the bloody way’, or the woman loudly coaching a clueless home-alone teenager over the phone on the intricacies of restarting the boiler. Because the waiting is over, and relief has magicked away those soul-destroying hours.

There is pleasure in patience, and reward in waiting. Often, these lows are the sugar that elevates the high to optimum sweetness. I’m not just waiting, I’m powering up.