Positively Glorious!

I’ve never really had a problem with waiting.

I know that many people hate to wait for things– appointments, people, Christmas, whatever. That’s the reason that, as much as I can, I try to be early when I meet with people. I’m afraid that people don’t want to wait for me. At the same time, I sometimes wish people would show up late for meetings with me– even an hour late, I’m okay with that. Waiting, to me, is something of a gift.

The beauty of waiting is that often you have nothing else to do but wait. You usually can’t run some errand or take care of a bit of work or start a new project. You can’t really do anything but wait. That’s probably why many people hate waiting, and why I love it. Waiting is a break, a pause, a space. Waiting is an opening of time where the stretch of experience is expanded, however briefly, into a period of silence, and in that silence there is nothing to do but be.

Waiting is like God saying “Hey, why don’t you take a minute and relax. Chill out and stare off into space. No guilt, there’s nothing else you can do. So hang out and breath.” I love waiting.

Except when I’m waiting for something that might, or might not, be just really, really, horribly bad.

Then waiting pretty much sucks.

The Debrief

So I had this endoscopy to see how poorly cooked the hamburger meat of my esophagus is. The normal procedure is that I stop eating or drinking anything 12-18 hours before I go in, then they dope me up with happy juice, shove a camera in my throat, then slap we awake and give my wife and I a little debriefing on how things looked. The last two times, they brought pictures from my previous endoscopy and showed us the comparison side by side:

Here’s where your Barrett’s changes are, and it looks like this area is reverting back to non-Barrett’s tissue, which is a good thing. We took biopsies here and here, just to make sure, but overall…

In general, I get about 5% of whatever the hell they are talking about, because I’m too busy staring at the particular color maroon of the doctor’s tie and wondering if Jess is going to put some food in me soon because the doctor’s tie looks pretty damn tasty… ooh, look, a leprechaun!

This time, things were different. It was all the same until the end– the debriefing part. At the point where I expected the doctor to come and at least give me a quick rundown, a nurse came instead and said “Alright, you can leave.”

??

Unfortunately, I wasn’t in much of a state to realize anything, because I wanted to eat something and pass out. It wasn’t until the next day when I realized what had happened.

The thing about it is that I really, really like that whole debriefing part. I’m consistently worried about my esophagus going bad, and so having the doctor come out and talk with me and say “it’s getting better” or “it hasn’t changed” gives me a state of comfort that I don’t even know they realize. Hell, even if the doctor came out and said “It looks worse, but we know how worse it looks” it would help. It would at least be better than, well:

…

We’ll Call You

The next day, I started to wonder why I didn’t get the debriefing, and wondering made me concerned, and concern made me worry, and worry made me… well, you get the picture.

So I called the Gastrointestinal clinic at the Portland VA to ask, basically, if there were preliminary results that the doctor could tell me– you know, the way they usually do? I got to “preliminary” before being cut off with “Your results will be available in two weeks and you can discuss them with your primary care physician at that time.”

Uh, okay. So I called the primary care clinic– not to get the results that were two weeks hence, but to try to find an actual human to say “So, we usually walk out with pictures and an initial write up and didn’t get that and I’m trying to find out why.” Again, I didn’t get very far before: “You’ll be scheduled for a follow-up apppointment with the GI clinic when test results are available and should direct all enquiries to the GI clinic.”

“Follow-up appointment?”

“But the GI clinic sent me…”

It never actually dawned on me before that “The run around” was actually, well, round.

“There and Back Again, A Veteran’s Tale”

Again I call the GI clinic– and again it’s just to ask if the doctor can just speak about the initial results with me as has always been the case until now. The message I got this time was a very firm and annoyed “Stop calling us to get your results, we’ll call you when your results come in.”

Ouch.

Where’s Patch?

This was very frustrating to me. The run around above was actually a subset of the calls I made– people telling me to call other people, etc. And every time, I was trying to get a message across that they didn’t hear.

I mean, I do understand that biopsies go to a laboratory and they just don’t know the lab results. But there’s not much point in shoving a camera down my throat to see what’s there without a doctor actually seeing it– and that’s all I wanted to know. Well, Doc, what did you see?

The disturbing thing is that maybe the reason he didn’t say anything is because it was just that bad. I try not to spiral down that road, but it’s hard without any kind of feedback.

And that’s really why I wanted to call. I tried to tell people, “Listen, I’m just really worried about what’s going on, and thought that we’d get to see the doctor after the procedure to discuss what he saw. I just want someone to actually listen to me. Even if they only say ‘John, I know you’re worried that things didn’t go the way they usually do, but by now the doctor might not remember, so we have to wait for the report.’”

This is the problem I see with modern medicine– it’s actually why I left the medical field. People aren’t people. They are conditions, and results, and statements. When I call the VA, I’m not ‘John.’

I’m ‘M5285′.

I’m not a guy that’s worried about what’s going on and just wants to at least ask the nurse if, maybe, this particular doctor just doesn’t do the whole debrief thing– maybe it’s not about me at all. I’m not a guy because nobody has time to even get into that. They have just enough time to look on a screen and see that ‘M5285′ has a note beside it saying ‘results pending.’

Stop calling us, M5285!

Even if they said nothing of substance, but said that they knew that I was worried, it would do one thing. It’s the one thing that many people want when they are in the hospital– it’s the one thing that every single one of us wants more than anything in life, in fact.

It would show me that I had been acknowledged as a human being.

I really wish medicine didn’t have to be that way. Patch Adams had the right idea– treat people as human beings. Tt’s a shame that concept doesn’t catch on.

That’s really all I want. That’s what the other doctors did when they came out and talked to me afterwards. “Hey, I know you’re probably worried about this, so I’ll give you a quick run down… because you and I are both humans, and that matters to me.”

Acknowledgment. Humanity.

This time, I didn’t get that.

This time I’m just M5285, waiting for results.

This time, I really hate waiting.

Because this time, I’m mostly scared that there won’t be a human on the other side.