Half Life - 31 - waiting
May 28th, 2021
Doctor, and more importantly Consultant, time is the most valuable commodity not actively traded on the financial markets. Time is not of equal value and patient time is worth little in the non-emergency hospital world. Waiting for over an hour, sometimes two, for the precious ten-minute audience is to be expected and should be factored in as part of all food decisions, reading matter choices, and childcare commitments. Regular rituals help fill the gaps, offering glimmers of hope that the moment you have been waiting for is drawing near. Regular weighing makes sense, many medicines are tailored to body size, and steroids encourage eating to such an extent that changes between appointments can be shocking. My question to the nurse of why they keep measuring my height at the same time as my weight was at first met with a confused look and then a laugh, indicating realisation. Growth upwards in 53-year-olds is rare, as is shrinking without leg amputations. Unsurprisingly, my height has remained constant since the very first time, but this has not changed the process and it still gets measured every time I get weighed.
Cancer teaches you to become good at waiting, it’s an essential skill for the chronically sick. The alternative is to be driven mad by frustration and impatience. Being on time is vital for patients and those driving them to appointments. Arrive a few moments after your allotted time and others will have moved up the list and, like a sinbin for the sick, you find yourself in the ‘see if we can squeeze you in’ box. An unknown time of waiting stretches ahead with the only, considerably riskier, alternative being trying to re-book for another day.
Magazines are an invitation to the forces of chaos to create additional delay as a punishment for excessive optimism. This gets doubled if you bring only one with you as reading material. A five-hundred-page book, preferably one you have just started, sends the right message. To stand the best chance of being seen within an hour, settle into a sweaty, wipe clean, plastic covered chair, park a paper cup of water by your side, adopt the perfect ‘I can wait all day’ expression, and do not attempt to catch a nurse’s eye. Under no circumstances be the one in the waiting area endlessly popping over to the reception counter to find out if it’s your turn yet.
Waiting is not all joyless disappointment and endless book reading. Doctors’ surgeries provide a perfect opportunity to learn more about what ails the local community. The addition of protective Perspex screens forces patients to speak loudly and often to repeat themselves, making it much easier to hear what is wrong with them. The urge to provide considerably more information than your name and time of appointment is a characteristic shared by nine out of ten patients. The tenth, presumably, has gonorrhoea or syphilis and so holds back on detailed explanations. In the cancer clinic, the game of guess the cancer becomes possible. Like the surgeries, and although never asked, most patients feel the need to tell the receptionist what they have as they check in. The objective is to guess what flavour of cancer they are bringing with them between walking through the door and overhearing this inevitable confession. Default option for men is prostate and for women it’s breast, but that is just playing the statistics on the most common cancers. Guessing the rare ones is much more satisfying, such as testicular for men wearing curiously baggy trousers and throat cancers in women wearing tightly tied scarves.
Test and scan results demand patience at home, they will arrive when the medical establishment is ready for you to have them, which can be days after they have been generated. Calls to hospitals, where the answering machines do most of the work, trigger an automatic twenty-four-hour delay on any information you want being sent through as a punishment to deter you from trying it again. Fortunately, there is a correlation between the happiness the results will generate and the length of delay in being told them. So, the adage of no news being good news helps tolerate the long gap between the doctors knowing and them telling their patients.
Waiting can, sometimes, be worth it. Although it took four days after the scan to find out if the radioactive isotope being injected into me is killing Nobby, or just damaging my kidneys for no reason, the result was a good one. Not only has a key marker for prostate cancer (PSA) dropped from what had been a disturbingly high level when the treatment started, but also the scan shows some reduction in the size of some tumours and the number of overall detectable tumours. It is not going to obliterate the cancer or be a cure, but it looks like it will buy me more time in the land of the living. Treatment is going to continue and, although the week of isolation after every injection is dull and awkward as I wait to get back to normal, it is worth it. Thanks to the advanced training in waiting skills provided over the past years courtesy of the medical community, my ability to cope is now highly developed. Content with a comfy chair and a good book, the only change is swapping the water for a large glass of wine, one of the benefits of waiting at home.
Sage advice on waiting techniques here Bro! Also- I have now set up a business trading in Hospital Consultant Time Futures as this will be bigger than Bitcoin!
Great news! And perceptive as usual!