The Waiting Room – The Hospital Diaries -1

Where the past doesn’t matter, and the next day looks a distant dream, like many others, we were surviving each day in that dreaded waiting room. A hall of a size of living room, had several lifeless families, just living to see through their loved ones out of claws of death. Families across different north-Indian states have made that waiting room their temporary homes. Few arrived a just a day before, and some surviving for several months. When your loved one is battling his/her life inside an ICU, wired to a bed, family also shrinks itself to survive on 6×3 ft of floor area, just few walls and meters away, in a waiting room. Our family, floored by this unexpected misery, too got some space to straighten up our backs. But Dad chose a bench, to sit through his sufferings. From the day our mother was in ICU, I had seen dad aging from being my “retired friend” to a “tired father”. He was busy receiving concerned calls, from relatives over the phone. While their blessings were the gifts to us, though in return we could only give them our mother’s ever-changing medical status.