Sitting in the waiting room

My father had surgery on his heel today. I spent most of the day in the hospital waiting room. Mostly I waited.

First I waited for the orthopedic surgeon to come and see me. The last half hour was the worst. I was fidgety, couldn't read my magazine (I'd brought The New York Review of Books, which isn't always the most engrossing publication), kept worrying that I'd missed the surgeon somehow.

After the surgeon came out to see me (with good news--he was OK, there were a few large fragments, and they were able to partially reconstruct the calcaneous and added screws and a plate), I waited for my father to get out of the recovery room. I waited another two and a half hours, reading articles on the Met's production of Lucia di Lammermoor and on the Mughal emperors of China, reading about Paul Krugman's conscience and an unorthodox history of economic development.

They finally assigned him a room, and I went up to it, where I waited for him to come up from recovery. Mostly I paced.

When I finally saw him, as they wheeled him down the hall and into the room he'd been assigned, he looked good, and I was glad that I'd been there, waiting. When the surgeon had come out to see me and deliver the news that the surgery went OK, I had given him my father's glasses and asked that he return the glasses to him. My father told me that when he woke up and realized that he could see, he also had known that I was waiting for him, and he had felt better knowing that I'd been there, waiting.