Health · fiction
Fear of receiving a diagnosis
A story about a woman waiting for a test result in a hospital corridor, and the nurse who teaches her to wait without being alone.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
The corridor had forty-two blue chairs, fixed to one another by an iron bar. She counted three times.
She was fifty, lived in a cold-climate town in the mountains of Colombia, and had been there since seven in the morning, waiting for a test result. A small lump, found by chance, in the shower. The doctor had said it was probably nothing. She had heard "probably". Only that.
For the last two weeks, that word had lived in the house with her. It sat at the table at breakfast. It lay down in bed at night. It went with her to work, to the market, to Mass. Probably.
Beside her, in chair number seventeen, a very old woman was knitting. On the other side, a young man jiggled his leg nonstop. In front, a mother held a sleeping baby. No one spoke. Everyone was waiting for the same thing in different ways.
She took out her phone to search what it could be. She stopped. She had already searched too much. Every search opened a door into a darker room.
She closed her eyes.
And there, in the corridor of blue chairs, a vision came.
She saw the corridor long ago, when there was no hospital yet, only a field of grass in the mountains. She saw a woman, from another time, sitting on a rock, waiting for news of a son who had gone down the river. Her waiting was the same. She saw other waitings, through the centuries. Women at ports, at stations, at the doors of houses. Men in maternity corridors. Children at the window, waiting for their father to come home. She saw that waiting was one of the oldest and most human things there is. That no one ever learned to do it properly. And that no one, ever, had to do it alone.
She opened her eyes. The knitting woman had stopped and was looking at her.
"Is it your turn to be afraid?" the old woman asked.
She laughed, without meaning to.
"It is."
"Mine was last month. Today is a follow-up."
"And did everything turn out fine?"
The old woman thought for a moment.
"It turned out how it turned out. But I wasn't alone with how it turned out."
A nurse appeared at the door and called a name. It wasn't hers. The young man with the restless leg got up and went in. The nurse, before closing the door, glanced along the corridor, saw her face and came back.
"What result are you waiting for, ma'am?"
She told her.
The nurse said nothing about the test. She couldn't, and didn't pretend she could. She said only:
"When they call you, would you like me to come in with you?"
She didn't know she could ask for that. She said yes.
She was called an hour later. The nurse went in with her and stood beside the chair, a hand on her shoulder, while the doctor explained the result slowly, looking her in the eye, answering every question. What he said stays with her. That isn't what matters in this story.
What matters is that she left that room, whatever the news, with a hand on her shoulder. And that, on the way out, she passed the knitting woman and said: thank you.
The following week, she went back to the hospital without needing to. She sat in one of the forty-two blue chairs, beside a young woman jiggling her leg. And she asked:
"Is it your turn to be afraid?"
Bairo says he learned, at rock bottom, to trust in something unseen, and that no one crosses alone. Read: The God of the impossible.
The way forward
The fear of waiting isn't solved by more searching; it shrinks with company. Bring someone with you and know that you can ask a health professional to stay beside you and explain every word. And, when you can, be the hand on the shoulder of someone who is waiting.