Waiting Game

Even before I moved, I was recruiting people to visit Montreal. Any time the subject would come up, the conversation would end with an invitation. Now that I actually live here, I want visitors even more. One of the pleasures of living somewhere new is sharing it with the people in your life. When Jill came to visit in November, we picked her up from the bus station and she said something like, "Guys, I know this is sounds dumb but...all the signs are in French!" Wonderment. It's in all the little details which you take for granted but are still brand new to your house guests.

We have a substantial list of people who want to come down for visits, parents, siblings, friends. Adrian was on the list, and this past weekend he finally hopped on a bus at 1AM on a Saturday morning to see La Belle Province. He arrived here just after 9AM, which means I got my butt up at 8:15 on a Saturday to hustle to the station and pick him up. Oh, and also, I was in excruciating pain.

Flashback to Wednesday when I couldn't fall asleep due to this loud aching in my torso, waking me up a couple of times that night, not allowing me to find any shade of comfortable. Thursday, Friday, nothing. Saturday morning, getting on the metro to get to the Greyhound station, I was taking toy soldier steps to keep from aggravating this encore of agony. My thought was if I could wait until Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, after Adrian left and Rebekah was at work, neither of them would have to know or worry about me, and I wouldn't ruin the weekend.

Well, as Adrian and I wandered up Mont-Royal Avenue, stopping into a bakery for a small breakfast, it was clear there may have been some problems with this plan. I was half hunched by the window of the bakery, I could feel sweat break out across my forehead and when I picked up our tray, I think my hands were shaking. My stomach was in hardened knots, twisting and constricting. A small sliver of me thought I might pass out. When we sat down, I was able to pull myself together. That was at 10AM

By 4PM in the afternoon,  I wasn't sure I could function until Monday, and I finally fessed up. Adrian and I headed off to the nearest walk-in clinic, my hopes for a quick fix crushed when the sign on the door said it was full and taking on no more patients for the day. We headed to a Second Cup to get internet and to text Bek, who, in another scene, threw out half of a freshly bought coffee in order to her hustle her ass home to check on me. We concluded with no after hours clinics available, we ought to go to the hospital.

Cut to the waiting room of St. Mary's, the three of us sitting in a row. Waiting room is not a misnomer. I swear we sat there 2 hours before Adrian and Bek took their leave. Adrian needed to check into his hotel and Bek needed to feed the cat and check on the pork shoulder I had tossed in the slow cooker earlier, visions of an awesome dinner for all of us dancing in my head.
I had no aftershocks of pain as I sat in the waiting room alone, but with each minute that passed, I felt myself sinking into what everyone else around seemed to have caught. Hopelessness, exhaustion, the grey-washed mood of watching time march slowly on while you sit and wait and go nowhere. I remember looking at the time in the corner of the television playing French CBC and thinking, Please, hospital gods. My friends need a weekend. Please let me be okay and let us get out of here in time to have a good Saturday night. When people come to visit, my own expectation is that I show them a good time. Touristy stuff, restaurants, boutiques, live music. Pretty much the opposite of sitting in a waiting room where everything on the walls is crooked and you can hear someone horking phlegm in the bathroom every five minutes. 

I shot them a couple of texts telling them that they didn't have to come back. Even if it was just to wander around solo and get a sampling of the atmosphere, I wanted Adrian to experience Montreal. I wanted Bek to have her Saturday to herself after a long week at work. But they came back without hesitation, reclaiming their seats on either side of me. We snacked on candy canes for dinner. We tried to tag team crosswords on Bek's iPad to pass the time. We giggled over inside jokes, old and new, not only because they were funny, but to try and keep our sanity together while literal hours scraped on and on. Adrian wandered out to a convenience store to find us food since the cafeteria was closed, I got the Golden Girls theme stuck in my head, and all around, we were the people in the waiting room having the best time. Which is kind of like saying you had a somewhat-kind-of-mostly painless death.

I can't explain how hard the wait was at times, when our laughter died, we leaned on eachothers' shoulders, buried our faces in our hands. Exhausting. Boring. Grueling. When the intercom would call what seemed like everyone except me in for examination, I could feel my hope leaving, along with everyone else's in the room.

Between feeling sick and being surrounded by people who are also suffering, for an undetermined amount of time, you can be pushed to your limits. The wait was insane...but it would have been nearly impossible if those two hadn't stayed with me. At the same time, mama was texting me. She refused to go to bed until she heard answers, because her worried mom-ness had her convinced that I was going to have to have my appendix removed. I'm lucky in both that I still have my appendix and that I have an amazing support system. I'm sure if I had needed anything serious, my mother would have been on the next flight down, ready to kick ass and Florence Nightingale me.

We arrived at the hospital just after 5PM and around 1:30AM, they finally called me into one of the rooms, had me strip down, poked at me a bit and told me that it was WEIRD, but it didn't SEEM like there was anything wrong with me. It sounds funny to say but I had not waited 8+ hours to be told I was fine. Fine was not the answer I was looking for after being crippled by mysterious pain. The doctor said maybe it was sort of inflammation of the tissue in my torso, gave me some pills for the pain and signed me on up for an ultrasound, which I have at 10AM tomorrow. (I'm sure that'll be some kind of interesting blog in itself.)

The moral of this story is that having good people in your life makes intolerable things tolerable, and for that I am truly, truly grateful. Also, waiting rooms suck.