THE WAITING ROOM

     The ICU waiting room is filthy with people who want to tell you their fucked-up stories of disease and close-calls and death and misery.  I have nothing in common with any of them.  Thank God.
      A woman I’ll call “Florence” keeps going on about her father, who’s about the most unlucky individual on the planet to hear her tell it.  She paces back and forth on the 80’s, New Wave-ish carpet.  Her age is probably 55 if I had to guess, with a Southern drawl that could stop a Southern Pacific in its tracks.  She looks as if she gave up on dressing her age when she was in her 20’s.  Acid wash jeans that have strange laces on the shins, tapering at the ankle.  The stylish black hoodie has the name of some hip-hop star neither of us has ever heard of.  The hair has a faint blonde tint to it, but she apparently thought the gray wouldn’t possibly show through.  It does.  If you took her face completely off, like an action figure I had as a kid that was based on “Mask-O-Tron” from the TV show “The Six Million Dollar Man,” Flo might be able to fool you.  But the lines run deep, as does her father’s story.
     According to her, he’s got what she calls “non-slow, degenerative, Type-3 cancer.”  She tries to make sense of it and doesn’t do a very good job.  He’s dying with very little hope of preventing it.  That’s all she knows.  As she goes through the long list of comparative tumor sizes throughout his body (golf ball-size in his lung, quarter-size in his testicles, half dollar-size in some other part of his body), I’m wishing that he’d already die and put her, him and especially me out of our collective misery.  My concerned face is in full force.  You know, that half-angered, furrowed brow, index finger and thumb on chin, shaking head thing.  Occasionally I let out a “Jesus” with just the right amount of disbelief.  More minutes go by than I realize as she lists off the different –cologists that her father’s scheduled to see.  He’s on so much morphine that he doesn’t even know what day it is.  He tells her that he refuses to miss Christmas since it might very well be his last, so she keeps telling him that it’s the Saturday before, over and over.  Sadly, it is Christmas and she begs the doctor to let them take him home, then bring him back for the necessary treatment.  From the doctor’s outlook, it sounds like it wouldn’t make any difference, which is why Flo sits here spilling it out to me, I guess.  The waiting game.  Seems to me this would be the family that would rather put a bullet in his brain than have him go through chemo.
     And those are my last thoughts as I leave the ICU waiting room with my mother in the wheelchair, carrying her make-up bag in her lap.  Some poor, old bastard looking forward to opening his presents and seeing his in-bred grandchildren surrounding him, smiling as they pull the trigger.




-SLL