In the emergency room waiting room, a patient waits his turn, in Montauban, southern France, on July 20, 2022.VALENTINE CHAPUIS/AFP/Getty Images
Arjun Sharma is a physician at the University Health Network in Toronto.
The man sitting beside me is hunched over his phone, staring intently at Wordle’s five yellow, green and grey tiles. The word they are nudging him toward is clear to me. My eyes move back and forth nervously. Will he ask for my help? I want him to arrive at it, as I have. I bring it to the tip of my tongue. But then, I reel it back. Puzzling in public, I remind myself, has an etiquette: Offer an answer only if one is asked of you.
Not so long ago, I happened to be in my doctor’s waiting room. My livelihood revolves around them as a time-pressed physician. But rather unexpectedly, I was now waiting in one.
Sorting through the Wordle was just one subsumption into the democracy of an interminable patience. Scrolling, hand-wringing, clock-staring, pacing, foot-tapping. Scrolling, again. While helping pass the time, each was also a necessary distraction. I was not there with a significant ailment, yet I couldn’t say for certain it was an insignificant one, either. My worries were charged by the vagueness of my symptoms, which, as they persisted and grew more varied, I struggled to tidily explain.
That wasn’t all. I was someone who rarely saw my doctor. And what was forming were the eerie parallels to the tragic stories of the cruel diseases that blindside otherwise healthy people in their mid-30s – those I was familiar with, as their doctor, not mine.
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As physicians, the ins and outs of our patients’ lives are not always accessible to us. That’s because, in between touch points with doctors, so much of being a patient has to do with, well, waiting.
Sinking ever deeper into my seat, I stew over the modern consternations that plague our systems of health care. I direct my ire toward a collective complaint: time. And rightfully so. We wait for MRIs and CT scans, for appointments with specialists, for procedures and surgeries. The wait only grows longer. It also doesn’t stop there. After that, time must be taken for treatments to take effect, for lives to return to normal.
Nowhere is the idea of waiting made more tangible than in our waiting rooms. But what of those with whom we wait? Where our medical care falls short in this aspect of timeliness, I found, surprisingly, that it might exceed itself in another.
In the early years after the formation of Britain’s National Health Service, concerned practitioners lamented how, in their new waiting rooms, they could find a “daintily dressed milliner” seated beside “a labourer injured with a muck-fork who did not stop even to wash himself.” Though injuries with muck-forks are perhaps less commonplace now, I was made to wonder: Where else in society do we gather with such a morass of disparate people?
Arguments could be made for sporting events and concerts, or even public transit, which captures broad swaths of us every day. But rallying around the hometown team, jiving to an artist for the sake of entertainment or being connected to a destination we hurriedly disperse from feel superficial. They don’t necessarily help us understand the scale of our life in relation to others.
A person waits to be treated in a waiting room at the ER department at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), in Montreal, April 22, 2025.Graham Hughes/The Globe and Mail
Waiting rooms create this interpersonal tether in more ways than one. With their humdrum nature, they still reliably proffer small talk, that vanishing way for people who don’t know each other well, and who are stuck together, to foster a connection. Most hew, inveterately, to mundane topics. Some, however, take the opportunity to be surprisingly candid about more than just the weather and baseball. One could appreciate what it’s like to go through a third divorce. After a woman might describe the challenges of getting work as a plumber in the widely male profession while holding her infant, you can listen to an older man who struggles with the sudden capaciousness of his home after being recently widowed.
I remain mum about myself. Partly out of a keenness I have for the unvarnished perspective of life as it happens to us, but, admittedly, too, out of self-preservation. I worry about being the fated messenger for the thorny issues to which I myself seek answers: not only for the wait we endure for medical care, but also why so many lack access to a family physician, how vaccines have become such a political flashpoint. If not those topics, perhaps I would wonder what is holding up the doctor.
Yet, what ultimately moulds a sense of togetherness is vulnerability. All of us are waiting for things we aren’t necessarily prepared to receive.
This means we share a bond of something both deeper and more ubiquitous. What sets in while in the waiting room – beyond a shared contempt over the general tardiness of our health care system’s function – is an implicit realization that we are each made of the same fragile constituency: of flesh and bone, mind and muscle. Which all, in some way or another, inevitably falter.
“Thanks for this,” an older man told me the other day, holding the flimsy paper on which I had written his prescription. “I know I don’t have it as bad as others, but I appreciate it.” It is easy to slip into a mindset of Schadenfreude: to find comfort in the pain and failure of those who surround us, where what ails you is pushed under a more forgiving light. I knew that’s not what he meant.
But what he alluded to was the transformative power of where he had just come from: a room that draws us out from our growing culture of self-obsessiveness, which equalizes our differences by bringing them up close.
The rough outline of a basic humanity is what our most vital civic spaces should create. They ought to make clear the tie between a person who might live within one of our city’s most gilded enclaves and another who will return to living in his storage locker. A waiting room does just that. We might not share each other’s privileges or hardships, as we might not political views. We don’t need to.
We are there, instead, with a common human purpose: to meet a positive result with relief, a setback with disappointment, a future, we hope, that holds a better version of ourselves.
Eventually, I’m called by my doctor. He reassures me that what I have isn’t as serious as I had imagined. (I will yet have to wait – for a scan, for my medicine and for a while to return to some semblance of my usual self.) Many make great efforts not to encounter this unglamorous corner of life that is wholly impervious to the desirous, impatient and isolationist ones we cultivate. But sometimes we must.
When we do, a waiting room can be more than just a place to wait. Look around. Gripe about yesterday’s game. And, for a moment, as I learned, see yourself in someone else.