Shoving on random clothes from around my bedroom floor , eating my breakfast in a repulsive scoffing-like manner and having to walk heavy heartedly to the nearest hospital to run an errand for my mum while she sat in her office at 6’o’clock in the morning is not something I imagined doing today in all of my wildest dreams. And as I looked up at the ash pile gathering of clouds above me, they seemed to reflect the exact mood I was feeling towards my mother for depriving me of sleep on a summer vacation. Maybe I am being ever- so slightly overdramatic but you know it’s not going to be the best of days when you are rudely awaken by an earthquake of vibrations coming from underneath your pillow that scares the hell out of you. This is only to find out that you have a text message from none other than your mum and to be in charge of cleaning up her mess when she could have quite easily retrieved the much needed scrubs herself. Okay, rant over now.
Anyways I needed an outing- pretending to be a vampire and hiding in my bedroom for days being a recluse was doing no good for me- I just felt even more exhausted at the end of it. The wind seemed to clean out my lungs as I dragged my heavy body towards the direction of my location and felt like it was a never-ending journey of tiredness. Let’s all face it; in some point in time we have all had the joy of sitting in a waiting room. That visit to your doctor, the nail shop, the dreadful dentist office, nerve wreaking job interviews. That wait can expose you to some very irritating habits of other people. In every waiting room you tend to encounter at least one of these groups of people. You have the cell phone talkers who don’t have a problem sharing their personal business with everyone; you have those pesky kids whose parent seem oblivious to the terror their little ones are causing; and you have those habitual question askers who always take up the time of the receptionist, leaving you to wonder if that is causing your own time to be delayed. Just walking through that waiting room at St Aiden’s ER department opened up memories which were like wounds that had not yet healed yet- too ghastly and too unimaginable to conjure up again. And after the symphony of coughing, hacking and wheezing with the background vocals of thunder and lightning that greeted me; I headed unintentionally to the closest antibacterial hand dispenser and started working it like a gambling addict hitting up a VLT machine. I stared down at my hands twisting and knotting them as if doing so would hold back the turmoil inside me. I focused on my sparkling red freshly painted fingernails instead not wanting to faint from the sights of someone’s grim accident or to make unnecessary eye contact with anyone in particular. Despair roamed the room, expelled on the breath of worriers like me and those doing their best to bite down on the pain that brought them here. And then the smell hit me like a meteor from outer space. It was bleach, blood, vomit and some other ingredients, saturating the stale air like an old sponge. I gag and pull my sweater over my nose, breathing in the fibres. I’m too lazy, exhausted and fatigued to take the healthy option of heading to the stairs so I divert my legs to the elevators instead. Suddenly aware of the crowd surrounding me, I nervously push the button and patiently wait. I surveyed my location. Four heavy looking elevator doors stood side by side like the next version of a transformer and due to the unwanted noise which keeps re-entering my small eardrums I pray for the elevator to come quicker to escape this headache. The door promptly opens and I let everyone go in before me, not because I am feeling particularly generous at this time in the morning but because they look
