Doing Time

You learn the art of waiting when you're living with a difference or a disability because you have to wait a lot, especially when you're in the public system and at the mercy of Medicare. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been if we had taken out health insurance right from the start, but there's no way we could afford it. So, we've learned how to perfect the art of waiting and patience and doing our time with a positive attitude - or at least an attempt at it.

The art of waiting has taken over 25 years to perfect. I'm sure that in the early days I was impatient and became irritated, especially when the kids were little and a trip to the hospital to attend outpatients clinics would mean that the entire day was taken up. We'd have wall-to-wall specialist appointments in the one day. Often we'd get to the waiting area and would indeed, have to wait. For hours. The appointment may have been booked for 9am but we often wouldn't get in to see the specialist until 11am. The same would happen for the afternoon appointment.

You just learned that that's the way it was. We learned that we needed to prepare. We learned to pack books, activities and snacks for the kids and ourselves. There was no point in complaining. The clinic was busy. The specialists were seeing many, many children all the time, each of them equally as important as yours. When you got in to see the specialist, often they would spend more than the allotted time with our children so we began to understand and appreciate why clinics ran so ridiculously behind time. They were giving the best care with the resources they had. The nicest thing we as patients we could do was to learn to wait patiently and appreciate the care we were given.

I watch new parents come into clinic now. As I sit there waiting I see them come in and register at the clinic. They sit and fidget and look up expectantly every time a clinician comes out and calls a name, their face falling when it's not theirs. It's usually at about the 20 minute mark they get up and enquire with the receptionist how long the wait will be. They have no idea that I got there half an hour before they did and I'm still waiting. I've even had an irate new parent be seen before me. It's ok. They'll learn. They'll eventually learn the art of waiting. They'll eventually work out that in clinic there is no such thing as running to schedule and that time has no meaning. You wait and you'll be seen, eventually.

As I write, my son and I are waiting. We're in a new clinic. Our appointment was for 2pm. It's now 3:15pm. The waiting room is filled with people. Some have been waiting longer than us. We all will be seen eventually. We wait. What more can we do? We're being patient. All we can trust in is the hope that when we see our specialist he or she will give us the best care possible. It will make the wait worth it.

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