Waiting in the Waiting Room

I spent another four hours in a Kennestone Hospital waiting room.

Again, I fell through the cracks. Other people came, sat for about one or two hours and got a call or met with their loved one’s doctor and moved on. Not me. I stayed on and on.

There were two ladies at the desk. The procedure was to sit and wait. A doctor would come in or call and one of the two ladies would announce the name and the family of the name would come forward and either talk to the doctor or talk to him on the telephone, or maybe for more serious cases, there one two small rooms to the side to give them privacy. If you are a regular reader of my blog you might recall this was the same room that a younger man bounded out of the room, saying, “SHE DIED! SHE’S DEAD!!” And the whole family went to pieces running up and down the hospital halls screaming “SHE DIED!!”

But that was months ago. This day was more sedate.

The lady at the desk called out, “The Lord’s Family? Will the Lord’s Family please come up?!”

An elderly man with a very deep voice, “I hope we all are.”

I noticed one man brought his laptop. He did some computer work then called a client and told him he has a better insurance deal, he only has to pay $488 extra annually. Have you ever had an insurance agent call you and say he found out a way to save you money that you would actually pay less?

That same man, his sister, and a couple more loved ones of a patient, were sitting and a doctor came in to tell them how the operation went that he just completed. The good news is that she did great. The doctor said a few clever remarks about the procedure that cracked them up laughing. On a roll, he told them while they had her opened another assisting doctor told him he would be she wasn’t Jewish. I heard the word ovary mentioned. I didn’t hear the punch line but it cracked them up again. The doctor walked out laughing at his own antics the lady of the group suddenly quit laughing and said, “They were standing there openly laughing about her ovaries while she was knocked out?” Everybody quit laughing and got quite.

One lady about age 50 came in. She had on tight-ass jeans and a leopard skin blouse and matching boots. I think I have seen her in this same waiting room the last time I spent several hours here. Either that, or she has the exact same style (hair dyed black) as another woman. There might be more.

I overheard a man in a wheel chair tell that one time in 1988 he was watching a live lung operation on TV; he named the city and what university it was being broadcast from. When the patient’s chest was opened up it showed his lungs were black. They looked horrible. The patient was a pack a day man. The man in the wheelchair said he was too. When he was watching that on TV he was smoking a Pell Mell cigarette. He put his cigarette out and hasn’t had one since.
Then he had a coughing spasm and his wife wheeled him over to give somebody room to walk by.

The cigarettes quitting got me talking to a lady next to me. For some reason she told me her mother, who died about ten years ago chewed Red Man Chewing Tobacco and another brand of snuff. I asked had she ever looked into a spittoon.

She said, “Eeeuuuuwwww….. yes! How nasty!”

I said it was nice we didn’t see spittoons anymore, times are changing. She agreed.

I told her at a bluegrass concert a year or so ago I saw an old geezer chewing a plug of tobacco and just didn’t look normal. She asked me where did I go to the concert and I said I didn’t remember, but named off several possibilities. She started asking me if I heard of some gospel singing groups. I never heard of any.

A big curly hair blond middle age lady sitting close joined in and told us she and her family are gospel singers and they lived in Cartersville where they mostly entertain but they have been to Florida, Murphy, NC, and Alabama signing. Now they have a 12 year old singer that really knows how to sing to a new beat and get down and people go ape over him. He is thinking of going into the ministry.

She was dressed in black and also had clothes like Elvis might have worn and on her pocket book in little glittering sparkles that spelled ELVIS. She said she was observing the anniversary of Elvis's death.Then someone overheard us and started talking about the top gospel singers of the north Georgia Mountains and western North Carolina. Someone else started naming groups they have heard, which triggered somebody else talking about what gospel singers they are fans of. I think over half people in the room were talking about their connection with gospel music. I looked around for the man with the deep voice who said he hoped everybody there were in the Lord’s Family – I bet he was a gospel singer too. I didn’t see him. He was missing something.

It is one of the few times lately that I have sat in a large room that everybody had Georgian accents. And it is the first time ever almost everybody there had some sort of relation to gospel music and they were all coming forth telling about it.
What did I just start?