Reflective Essay: My Father's Waiting Room

I was sitting in the corner of the waiting room, not paying attention to the busy hospital staff running around me. It was a dreary Thursday morning. My mom and I waited patiently for my dad to get out of open heart surgery. It was the longest seven hours I have every experienced. I spent a lot of time looking out the windows as the rain slowly trickled down them. I looked at every wall and every stain, nook, or cranny around. To this day I still remember that there were 3 cracker crumbs under the 28th chair and what looked like a pen under the blue couch. Every once in a while I could hear the small white clock tick back and forth, sinking with my heart beat. My mom helped me get out of a slump and we started putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle of a beach scene. Every once in a while, a nurse would come in and get a family to tell the news and how the surgery went.

We were not able to see him until he was done with the after surgery test and scans. When he was moved from the recovery room to the intensive care room, my mom and I got ushered up to his room. It has been 16 sleepless hours since I have last seen my dad. The sanitary smell of the hospital was starting to become natural. Before hand, I was told that my dad would not look the same. He would be swollen, hooked up to a lot of machines, and unresponsive. I was even told by family members that I should not go in and should wait until the next day to see him. I did not care to listen to them and I followed my mom up to the room. We followed a short girl who smelled like flowers up the stairs, to the right, and up a fancy elevator with a bunch of buttons that seemed to go on forever. I walked through the hallways uneasy as everyone was looking at us as if they had never seen people. The last step before seeing my dad was to wash my hands and put hand sanitizer on. The lady opened the door and we went down another hallway to my dad’s