Sounds creepy, doesn’t it? “The Waiting Room.” Thunder and lightning, loss of electricity, then a strange glow moves from one window to another. Only when the patients and small Kaiser staff realize they’re locked inside the waiting room does the aging head of the nursing staff find it necessary to inform all present of the gory murder/suicide of another staff member and a patient years ago, and of the strange, inexplicable occurrences since then…the bloody handprints on a ceiling too high for any of the staff to reach, the missing scalpels, the DNA retrieved from tuft of hair last week which matched the DNA of the murdered patient dead and buried half a decade before…
***
Okay, well anyway, lemme tell you of MY waiting room experience. My appointment was at 5:50p, so I thought if I got there early, I’d be seen early. Wrong. For nearly an hour I sat in extraordinary stillness watching the kids run amock around me as patients who checked in after me were called in. Next to the check-in windows was a flu shot table. The bored nurses giving the flu shots invited various patrons to their table with shouts of, “You get a flu shot this year already, honey? Ya want one? We just need to see your Kaiser card, dear. Don’t worry, we don’t bite. We just sting a little. Ha, ha.” People entering the waiting room for entirely unrelated ailments wafted to the flu table on pure whim. I was especially interested in the mother dragging her two sons in, ages 8 and 11 (I evesdropped…er…overheard). The mother made some inquiry to the counter, and the employee’s response was that the flu shots here are for adults only. The overweight mother looked annoyed and said, pointing to her knee brace, “I just dragged them all the way from pediatrics Building C down here, and I AM NOT going to climb stairs again!” The nurse at the flu station stood and asked the kids’ ages, then said, “Yeah, that’s okay, we’ll do ’em.” The younger boy immediately started to panic. “I AM NOT going to have a shot! I DON’T WANT a shot!” He gripped the counter and started to cower underneath it. The mother dragged him out and I didn’t hear what she said over the older boy’s declaration of, “You LIED to us!” The boys were eventually forced over to the flu table and the mother gripped the younger one, turned his head to herself, as the wailing started. “Look at your mom, it’ll be over with real quick,” the nurse with the big needle said to the boy. Almost before the wailing reached its full fever-pitch, the nurse was done with the shot. The boy was left looking rather sheepish as another boy about his age, in line with his own mom behind this boy, said, “I’m ready for my shot. I ain’t no chicken.”

There were several moments when the flu shot table was entirely open with no one in line. I have never taken a flu shot and I rarely get the flu. I’ve always reasoned it was unnecessary for me to pay the $25 to the mobile nurse that comes to the courthouse every year to administer flu shots, because I’d likely be sick from my immune response to the shot whereas if I chanced it, I wouldn’t even catch the flu. My parents had gotten flu shots before and both of them were sick as dogs. (I personally have never seen a dog sick, but if the saying has any logical backing, dogs apparently get very, very sick.) I figure my genetics are similar to theirs so my body would react the same way. Another genetic thing passed down from them to me tho — the Asian thrift gene. Despite my severe dislike of needles and all practical aversion to getting flu shots, I found myself seriously contemplating going to the table because, well, the flu shots were free. Even if I don’t need it nor want it, here is a hospital facility offering something that is normally in high demand — for free. And there’s no line.

What eventually saved me from taking up that painful and unnecessary offer was seeing an Asian woman and her son, who had received their flu shots about 10 minutes prior, come back into the room and walk up to the flu table. She asked the nurse some question. The nurse responded, “This is just the regular standard flu shot that they give us every year.” The woman said something else. The nurse replied, “No, it doesn’t protect you against anything specialized…no, it’s not the bird flu vaccine…well, the bird flu isn’t even in the United States yet…if it gets here, we’ll have to do something about it then, but right now you don’t gotta worry about it cuz it’s not here…” The woman eventually left with her son. I knew that the Asian newspapers and TV news and their overblown propaganda had gotten to her and she was uninformed as a lot of these Asian housewife types are. The Asian thrift gene suddenly lost its pull on me.