On Wednesday of this week, I spent 1 ½ hours in the lobby of the Riverside Doctors’ Group office building at 120 Kings Way in Williamsburg. This is about five miles from our house. Tim was having a medical procedure (not serious) and we thought he might need me to drive him home. His doctor’s office still prohibits casual visitors in their waiting room (it’s okay to be there if the patient needs assistance), so I waited in the lobby. I had a book, my chair was pretty comfortable, and I didn’t have anything particularly urgent to do that morning, so it was fine. (Side note: I did drive him home, although he probably could have driven himself.)
While I was in the lobby, I started paying attention to what was going on around me. Here’s what I observed.
The managers of the building were still requiring people to wear masks, although there was no longer a desk in the lobby where you had to stop to answer the four questions and have your temperature taken. Everyone was masked as they walked through the lobby.
This was not an ER lobby. There was no crying or hysteria. No blood. No crash carts. These people were going to scheduled medical appointments, for the most part.
An ophthalmologists’ office was down the hall on the right. The doctors there do all of their cataract surgeries on Tuesdays, and since this was a Wednesday morning, there was a fairly regular stream of people going down to that office to get their next-day check-up. The optician’s shop is down the same hall, and there was regular traffic in and out of that shop.
There was also a diagnostic and imaging center down the hall to the right. I’ve been there regularly for my mammograms and various blood draws. I was thinking about the people walking into that office – some of them were almost certainly there for routine check-ups, but it is also likely that some of them were responding to bad news that had been revealed on earlier tests, or getting follow-up scans to find out the status of their previously diagnosed illnesses.
On the left was an immunization clinic, with a sign saying “by appointment only.” In the first months of 2021, as the COVID vaccine became available, the line for this vaccination clinic snaked down the hall and around the corner. The area was dark and there didn’t appear to be anyone there today.
There was a lot of limping. People with casts or bandages on their foot, ankle, or knee. People wearing a “soft” shoe or slipper on one foot. People with canes or walkers.
There were a number of people in wheelchairs accompanied by a hired medical attendant. The patients were almost all white; the paid attendants were almost all Black and Latina women.
One man was brought in on a gurney. I’m not sure why. He had arrived via ambulance, but there was no siren. They went into the imaging and diagnostic center.
Most of the people in the lobby were – well, old. This is probably because it was mid-morning, and younger people are likely to be at work at this time of day. One thing I noticed about these older people is that they generally walked very carefully. Not necessarily slowly, but carefully. They were all very aware of something we all come to understand as we get older – gravity is not our friend. We have all had friends who were perfectly healthy before a fall – sometimes just a simple fall while they were doing something routine like going to the mailbox – and who ended up with hip replacement surgery and a move to an assisted living facility. Sometimes the move was temporary, but often it was permanent. The people walking through the lobby were watching where they were putting their feet, and they held on to railings and door knobs – or each other – when these supports were available.
Some of the people walking in or out were wearing scrubs or the less-formal equivalent – khaki pants and a polo shirt with some kind of logo. They often sported ID badges on lanyards. They walked quickly and weren’t as careful as the older people I described earlier.
Several couples walked in holding hands. One elderly man carefully and lovingly held the hand of his wife (I assume she was his wife), who walked tentatively with a cane in her other hand. She had a look of uncertainty on her face before he took her hand and guided her to the elevator. My immediate thought was that she was suffering from some kind of dementia and he was her husband and caregiver.
Most people were casually dressed – but they had on what I would call real clothes (no sweatpants or teeshirts). The men had on either jeans or slacks and a tucked in shirt with a belt. The women were dressed in casual but tidy dresses or pants outfits. I felt like a slob, because I was wearing sweats. In my defense, I had planned to just wait in the car. It’s hard to get used to this “real clothes” world again.
One person came in pulling a little red wagon with a bunch of boxes in it. I think the boxes held medical supplies. On the way out, the wagon held boxes of “samples” from various offices. I didn’t want to think about what was in the sample containers.
Several people stopped by my chair, thinking I was manning a checkpoint like this office building had for a couple of years. I told them I wasn’t a checkpoint and they went on down the hall or toward the elevators. One woman stopped to comment on how comfortable I looked, just sitting there reading, and how she hoped she would be able to do that later today. We discussed the virtues of reading a hardback library book versus a Kindle (I read on my Kindle when I travel, hardback library books when I’m home. She agree that made sense.) We smiled (I think we smiled – we had masks on but our eyes looked smiley) and she went on down the hall.
This was not a particularly remarkable morning, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed what was happening if I wasn’t thinking about my Substack newsletter. On Fridays I write about things going on around me, and I find that I’m always thinking about what I’m going to write about each week. This has one thing I like about writing this newsletter – it requires me to engage more directly with my neighborhood and community. Like Socrates and Thoreau said “An unexamined life is not worth living.” The more I examine my life, the more I find to think and write about.
I continue to thank you for reading.
The meme: 🤣🤔