The saddest place on earth is the waiting room of the pediatrician’s office at 9AM on a Sunday morning.
The miserable faces on the sick children. The exhausted parents with their sweatpants and coffee thermoses. The familiar room with its back-issues of Highlights magazine, uncomfortable chairs, and fluorescent glow. The kid’s activity set (germ-ridden, no doubt) with the beaded tracks and rolling train neglected in the corner of the room.
I am one of those bleary-eyed parents and my daughter Ruby, who turned one-year old 24 hours ago, snuggles against her mother’s chest. She has a snotty nose and high-grade fever. I have a headache and a short temper. None of us wants to be here.
As we check in at the front desk, I notice my watch (5 minutes past) and the number of kids already in the waiting room (1). There’s some confusion about insurance cards and subscriber ID numbers because of the new year, but I’m not paying attention. I will call their office tomorrow to sort it out.
We sit. I try hard to resist the urge to immediately pull out my phone and distract myself from the current situation. I last 3 minutes.
Ruby is sleeping. More children and parents file in, each looks more miserable than the set before them. I try to feel sympathy but honestly I’m relieved to know that I am ahead of all of them in line.
Except the minutes are passing and nurses are calling names other than Ruby. It’s now 9:55AM. I perk up from the phone and walk to the desk.
“Can you tell me where Ruby is in line?”
“Um, who?” checks list. “Sorry, who did you check in with?”
Biting my tongue. “Has there been an error? We checked in 45 minutes ago!”
The last time I was in this particular doctor’s office was nearly a year ago. We had been discharged from the birth hospital and told to visit the pediatrician the next morning to recheck Ruby’s bilirubin levels. After two days of blue-light therapy this would be her fifth heel prick in 48 hours.
Unlike the postpartum nurses, this nurse was not particularly caring. After a long struggle to get enough of a blood sample—Ruby wailing the whole time—the nurse admonished me for not keeping her foot warm enough. She had just been weighed naked at the intake desk and was swaddled in a blanket. It was somehow my fault that he couldn’t do his job efficiently.
I stared at the nurse, furious. He walked out of the room before I could gather myself to make a reply. Needless to say, the memory has stuck with me.
These memories flood my brain. I am curt with the front-desk attendants. I make demands and seek amends. But what can I really do? I make sure we are next in line and I go back to my seat.
Brooding. Remembering. Thinking. Did they even apologize? I didn’t hear them say sorry. I can’t believe we’ve been wasting time here. Ruby starts to cry. She is hungry and needs to nurse, but we can’t in the waiting room and we don’t know when we’ll be called back. We wouldn’t dare leave to feed in the car and miss our name.
Finally, we get called back. By this time Ruby is inconsolable. She has been so through most of the night. She is sick, and we are all very upset.
I wonder if I’m hiding my agitation any better than Ruby? Don’t they deserve to know how mad I am?
The nurse (a caring one) administers a dose of Motrin, but Ruby cries so much she spits up half. We go to an exam room and wait, again. Ruby falls asleep—thank God.
Thirty more minutes pass. The doc comes in and Ruby is rudely awoken as her ears are getting checked. She screams and squirms and I’m not confident the doc gets a good look. She says they seem okay, takes a swab sample from the nostril, and goes to test for the flu.
More waiting. Excruciating waiting. Time slows to a crawl at the doctor’s office when your kid is sick. I exchange glances with Ruby’s mom, who is handling all of this much better than I am. My focus shifts to the baby. How can I cheer her up?
We play peek-a-boo with my ball cap—one of her favorite games. I see her smile for the first time all morning. I set her on top of my shoulders and shuffle across the small room. Back and forth, we ride horsey, pausing to bounce in front of the mirror.
Ruby pulls at my hat, grabs my hair. She laughs and laughs.
A friend asks what the biggest change has been for me in the last year. Are you asking how having a baby has changed my life? How do I answer that?
Children teach you more about yourself than you could ever imagine. This creature whom you love and adore is yourself externalized. Your behavior and attitude toward life to this point have been driven by self-love and ego-building instincts. And then your first child is born.
You become less selfish and more attuned to the present. You start seeing kids and parents everywhere that you ignored in the past. You feel the bond between you and humankind tighten: This man walking by me on the street has a mother and a father—and don’t they feel toward him what I feel toward my child?
These are things you think on the good days.
Today is not a good day. But Ruby’s smile is cheering things up. Isn’t it amazing how babies can handle pain so much better than adults? Have you ever seen a stressed-out baby? Ruby’s laughter brings me some perspective and my own stress begins to fade.
The doctor returns with good news: no flu. But she’d like to recheck her ears now that Ruby is in a better mood. Ruby dismounts with a laugh, the doctor checks her ears and sure enough—a double ear infection. While writing the prescription, the doc tells us how difficult it is to measure inflammation in the ear canal when a kid’s entire face is bright red from crying.
I wish I could claim that I had enough patience and perspective in the moment to calm myself down. Or that I had the wisdom and foresight to know that playing games with Ruby would calm her down enough so the doctor could check her ears. No, I’m simply an exhausted dad who wants his baby to feel better. So I did what I knew to do. And yet there’s a lesson there for those who pay attention: Calm down, get some perspective. With most things in life, it is easier when we all are not crying.
Evolutionary biology describes a father’s desire to protect his children. As a bachelor, I chalked this up to some sort of mental obligation. On days like this, I witness it come alive and manifest itself into a physical, instinctive urge which won’t subside.
But what does the future hold? Ruby will get well. I realize that I am, as all parents are, destined to be disappointed—even irate—over the level of attention and care my daughter receives from future teachers, coaches, administrators, doctors, caretakers, and the like. Best to take a breath, calm down, and get some perspective.
I’m one year in and I am in for a long ride.