I padded around the waiting area in my beige socks and both-ways gowns. No one seemed to have an immediate agenda for me. There I was a few feet from the desk, a few feet from the chairs. Neither coming from nor going to. Like one of the undead. Nurses clutching clipboards gossiped and fussed with paperwork and looked through me for awhile. Sit over there, I was finally told, and so I sat in the third row of an impromptu gallery of plastic chairs facing nothing, the kind of arrangement you see in a small-town DMV. I sat there and read New York magazine for a long, long time, an article about a memoirist who might be lying, as others around me came and went and I began to wonder whether I'd been forgotten or whether the whole thing had been some kind of mistake, some complete and hilarious misunderstanding: You thought what, sir? You thought you were getting surgery!?
Then very quietly someone came over and got me.