As I sat in my gown in the waiting room (and it was an unusually long wait for this location), I watched the women around me, also waiting. One was busy doing paperwork on her lap, another was flipping through a magazine and sneezing. I, too, had a magazine in front of me but I was feeling overwhelmed with my anxiety and my fears for these women, too.
I have been reading about suffering and the Buddhist practice of tonglen. As I reflect on it now, I realize I was breathing in their anxieties, holding it in and letting it out with love--or trying to. But somewhere in my breathe, the transformation of suffering to love got stuck. Only fear remained in my body. I am new at this practice and did it imperfectly. But I tried.
(As I described this experience to a friend today she said, "we live within our walls in doctors' waiting rooms" and this struck me as a title for this blog post.)
Later, in the imaging room, I commented on how busy the office seemed--unusually so. The tech shared that "we've been really busy since the Affordable Care Act went into effect. We are seeing women who haven't seen a doctor for years and have been living with growing breast lumps." I felt both saddened and grateful for the fact that women are now getting healthcare--but to wait because of the lack of it seem horrible to me and a failure of our country.
Whatever comes my way from my mammo this year, I am one of the fortunate women to have had health insurance all my life and good doctors to help hold me up through my health challenges. I plan to buy flowers (tulips are my favorite) to take to the lobby and ask staff to distribute to women taking their mammos that day. In a small way, I want to cut a crack in the walls in the waiting room.
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