The Waiting Room
February 21, 2012 • by Thomas H. Hicks
Posted in Local News

Waiting is a part of the culture of medicine. Everything requires waiting. One waits for test results (these can be among the most torturous waits). One waits for appointments with an oncologist or surgeon. Then one is stranded for hours in doctors’ waiting rooms. One may wait for a hospital bed, and after being admitted to a hospital, further waitings take place.

When my wife was being treated for multiple myeloma, we spent a lot of time in a certain waiting room for cancer patients. We waited in that room with many others, all waiting for a
turn to see a doctor and then take a turn at having chemicals put into their veins in the desperate hope of stopping the cancer.

Efforts were made to make the large waiting room warm and welcoming. Light poured in through an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The other walls were a bright shade of sunshine
yellow. Yet the room had a uniquely dread-filled atmosphere.

As I look back to those hours spent in that waiting room, memories and images slide in on top of one another. Most of them return to haunt me. I recall the many jaundiced and skeletal faces, some whose eyes seemed to make up the whole upper part of their faces There was the man shiny with sickness, his bony hands kneading fistfuls of coverlets.

Another man sat, hands on knees, pain shouting mutely from his livid face, rocking forward and back to some secret rhythm. I remember the moaning woman running a Rosary through her fingers.

A regular in the waiting room was an emaciated man on crutches who shuffled through the room, guided by a young girl who kept an arm around his waist. And there was the man who shuffled about on his walker wearing a sweater and jacket zippered to his neck, a vague, vacant smile on his face.

Often I saw the unthinkable— children with cancer. Most of these children were bald from chemo. Some wore a stocking cap. In the treatment room one bald little girl donned a pretty silk scarf over her head. She was about seven years old, with dark bags under her eyes and pasty white skin. Every fifteen minutes or so, a nurse would wander over to check on her, tell her a joke to make her smile. While she sat peacefully in her wheelchair, fluid dripped intravenously.

I saw the girl’s mother nod and smile at the nurse. “She’s doing better today,” the mother would say, prompting, “aren’t you, honey?” The little girl grinned. “Really good today,” the mother said again, this time to herself. I choked back tears.

Parents and spouses waited with the patients. We generally had stricken, numb faces, often conveying unfathomable grief looking for signs of hope. We clung to every crumb of hope.

During these times in the waiting room, my brain started to trill why why why, what is the meaning meaning meaning? I no longer pretend to understand the world. It poses tormenting questions which I am convinced no one can answer. How does one reconcile faith in a loving God with the realities of that waiting room? Why, and for what purpose, is there all this horror? Who can justify a God who allows cancer to devour a person? How can there be such evil in the presence of an all-loving God.

Replies I’ve heard include: good comes from the evil; the suffering helps to mature us; it conforms people to Christ; it’s part of Adam’s curse. John Updike spoke of “a universe packed black with death. We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe” (Toward the End of Time, p.19).

The world has good things in it. It’s got love in it and kindness and people doing brave and honest things. It’s got beauty in it. But one comes to have a tragic sense of life.

Sometimes it seems that life’s nothing but waiting for awfulness to happen and trying to think about something else. I have concluded that most people increasingly experience life not as
a gift but as a burden.

Perhaps an answer I give will surprise you as being over simple or even superstitious and unreal. I believe that the ill were under the influence of an evil power. I do not believe in a God who bestows a cancer here, a deformity there, for you a septic embolism, for you multiple sclerosis, for you spinal meningitis.

I believe that disease can be a manifestation of Satan’s domination (cf. Lk.13:16).

Satan means the adversary, the enemy. The early desert monks distinguished between natural illness and the “illness of the demons.” It’s a world in which the Dragon is alive and well, and I expect that the great beast will raise its head and notice me at last.

However, overall, the patients I saw in the waiting room were generally resigned. I have never seen so much suffering, so much pain without complaint. Perhaps the Passion of Christ was being relived in the bodies of these people. Does our pain bring God’s gaze? Does He look on with loving attention? Are we included in a holy design? Perhaps, despite everything, goodness and mercy have all of us in their grasp.

 

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