X-rays suck.

So my doctor wanted me to get some chest x-rays. It’s nothing serious, my blood work was negative, but she just wanted to make sure my circulation was fine, too. This is all a residual effect of a nightmare weekend at the café two weeks ago. We were severely undermanned for the entire weekend and I had to work an eight-hour shift behind the counter alone. By the end of the weekend I was physically drained – I aggravated an old knee and ankle injury, bursitis in my elbow, and tendonitis in my hand.

Anyway, I took my doctor’s note to the x-ray lab and saw a lobby full of people waiting for x-rays. I needed to get back to work, so I asked the receptionist what their hours were for the next day. She told me that the wait wasn’t too bad, so I decided to stay and gave her my note. That was a fuckin’ mistake. Apparently “wasn’t too bad” is a relative term, because I was in that waiting room for TWO HOURS.

Not knowing the arduous wait I had ahead of me, I ran outside and fed an hour’s worth of coins into a parking meter and then returned to the lobbby to wait. I picked up an old Entertainment Weekly with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet on the cover that reminded me I needed to rent Finding Neverland, and one of the movie reviews inside confirmed my suspicion that the Fat Albert movie was terrible.

The guy sitting next to me was a very fidgety fellow. He was tall and lanky, and looked like he had some sort of middle-eastern ethnicity. His legs were crossed and he kept shaking his raised foot every few seconds. He’d get up every couple of minutes to see how soon he’d be called and to add to his annoyance factor he pulled out his noisy phone and started playing video games on it. I really wanted to hit this guy.

The guy sitting diagonally on the other side of me was a quiet middle-aged guy. He looked like the cool english high-school teacher with the gray hair and ponytail that all the students liked. He was reading a Fortune magazine, but when I took a closer look at him I could see he was occassionally glancing up over the top of the pages to stare at a girl sitting straight across from him. She was a tall redhead wearing a pink top and black skirt, her pasty white legs were crossed, and she kept running her hands up and down her leg as she read a copy of Dwell. I could tell she was driving the middle-aged guy crazy as his eyes strained to get a peek upskirt .

Sitting directly across from me was a large latina woman and her baby. The poor kid was the one getting x-rayed and he sounded terribly congested. The baby was understandably cranky, so the mother started to breast feed him. Then she pulled out her cell phone and started calling people. Great. That’s just what a crowded lobby of people needed, a loudmouth on a cell phone with a baby at her teat.

I needed to change seats, so I got up to get a drink of water and then sat back down on the other side of the lobby away from Fidgety Abdul and Cell Phone Mamacita. After an hour of waiting I realized my parking meter had expired — but I didn’t want to run outside and miss getting called. So now I had to sit there with the added stress of worrying about getting a parking ticket.

When I finally got called, the x-ray technician was no treat. She was a short curmudgeonly woman who looked like she’d seen too many stupid patients that day. And why is it that x-ray techs have to know why you’re getting x-rayed? She looked me over and asked in a judgmental tone, “...so you’ve got right-side swelling and your doctor wants chest x-rays?”

I told her that my doctor just wanted to be safe and check my ciruculation, so she wanted to see my heart and lungs. JUST TAKE THE DAMN X-RAYS, BITCH! That’s what I was thinking. I wanted to get out of there so bad. When it was finally done I headed out and saw that, luckily, I didn’t have a parking ticket.