05/21/03: The Waiting Rooms.

[juju]

Kathy and I were in the doctor's waiting room today, waiting to have her pregnancy evaluated. Most of the time we're there is spent waiting. Usually, it's about an 80/20 ratio. Today, we were there for an hour and saw the doctor for ten minutes. It's pretty boring. I usually sit there and wonder whether or not they're going to manipulate her vagina in front of me again. This time Kathy said it wouldn't happen, thankfully for me. It would just be a routine check-up and we would listen to the heartbeat again.

We've actually discovered that there are three different "levels" of waiting rooms before you actually get to see a real doctor. It's sort of like the layers of hell, only boring instead of hellatious, and fewer in number. First there's the waiting room where people first come in. We sit there for a while and wait for them to call Kathy's name. Then, a nurse comes out and says, "Katherine Morton?" It's at this point that we use all our pent-up excitement to jump up and run after the nurse. The nurse takes Kathy's blood pressure, weighs her, and then deposits us in a completely new waiting room. Great, more waiting! All we can do now is examine the god-awful wallpaper. We're happy to have progressed, but now we've let all this anticipation turn into excited energy, but all we can do with our tweaked-out selves is sit there and do nothing. It's very anti-climactic, but it still feels like graduation in a way.

Then, after about 20 minutes, a different nurse will come and take us to a completely different room. It's in this third waiting room that we will eventually get to see the doctor, but not before wating for another 20 minutes.

While we were waiting in the first room, Kathy was going on and on about which babies in her family looked like which parent, and trying to figure out which parental resemblance was more likely for a given baby based on her data.

"Well, so-and-so looks SO much like so-and-so, but then baby foo-foo looks like blad-diddy-blah. But then.."

Quite frankly, the conversation didn't really interest me. In fact, I was really only half-listening (is this a skill husbands learn?). Usually, when this happens, I try to come up with some really off-the-wall shit to say. I'll state something that she knows I hold the exact opposite opinion of, and then try to defend it to to the death. My goal is then to be as utterly convincing as possible, to try to convince her that I really do believe something that's completely insane, that I've stated the exact opposite of on numerous occasions. It's really fun, especially because of the looks I get.

"That's a myth.", I matter-of-factly stated. "Babies don't look like their parents, it's just a myth. Because really, people just see what they want to see. You can see similarities in anything if you look hard enough. It's just a human condition. Like UFO's or the Bible -- people see what they want to see."

I went on and on, but she wasn't buying it this time. She just looked at me (heh heh). But as I'm going off on my point, acting like a complete idiot, the nurse comes out and calls Kathy's name. So I jump up to follow them, and as I turn, I see this lady with too much make-up on, staring at me in utter horror and confusion. She'd been sitting right behind us the whole time, and I didn't know. In that split second, I realized that she'd just heard everything I had just said. But without knowing who I was, she probably just believed that someone was really stupid enough to think that babies don't look like their parents.

Heh.. that look on her face was priceless. I've never seen horror and confusion mixed together in such strong doses before. It was the highlight of my day!