IIt’s quite something to sit on a lime green, wiped-clean chair, with your tongue clamped to the roof of your mouth in fear, strangers in bushes walking quickly past every few minutes, while Katy Perry’s Fireworks pours out of a portable radio with the sound quality that you would expect at the lower end of a clear package.
This week I spent an hour in a medical waiting room in uncertainty. My soggy poncho hung over a nearby door; a woman behind me was reading a book in Spanish; someone has been knitting in the corner. Weaving us all together were the tinfoil-on-a-filler beats of commercial radio. Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen as I stared out the window at a jungle gym and felt the sweat between my breasts. Dance With Me Tonight by Olly Murs as she is taken to the toilet to provide a urine sample. Torn by Natalie Imbruglia when the person behind me was called for their appointment.
If this sounds like a criticism, it isn’t; not really. I was incredibly lucky to get this appointment, away from the main hospital, attached to a community centre, where I could be seen within 24 hours of my first phone call. The staff were so friendly that at one point I apologized for bothering them first on a Tuesday. It was calm, clean and comforting. But it was also awash with a hodgepodge of mid-’00s dance numbers and hair metal love songs that felt about as incongruous as having the front desk manned by someone dressed in a gorilla suit.
There was a sign explaining that they have the radio on to protect patient confidentiality at reception, which is admirable. But it does make you wonder whose job it is to choose the station. When I went to the orthodontist at 13 to have the wires around my teeth tightened with stainless steel pliers, I noticed the twinkling-eyed sadist tapping his foot to Hanson’s MMMbop. When I had a wart removed at the age of 20, I looked at the doctor’s face through a cloud of dry ice as Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart blared from the radio and thought, well, you’ll never do that in a script.
Apparently there is some evidence that music in waiting rooms can improve patients’ reported stress levels. That said, I just read about it a 2012 study in which “patients exposed to live Western popular vocal music performed by a music therapy student with guitar self-accompaniment reported greater satisfaction with their visit.” I’m clawing at my throat in horror at the idea of sitting in a waiting room, with sweaty palms and shaking knees, while a twenty-year-old with an acoustic guitar strums in the corner, with his mouth in what can only be described as his ‘pluck face’.
Medical settings are of course not always enlivened by pop music. Sometimes it’s television. I remember sitting in the waiting room of the delivery room where I had my son, facing a television screen as big and bright as the sun. Through a haze of contractions, urine samples and back rubs, I realized that the entire room was watching a game show at 3am with – as I remember it – a giant gold coin and someone swinging on a rope.
Similarly, during a recent appointment at an IVF clinic, my friend spent twenty minutes watching a television chef whose shirt was unbuttoned to somewhere around his colon as he cooked a piece of salmon on the Food Network. Was it distracting? Certainly. Was it useful? Not quite.
I would like to thank every member of staff who looked after me on that bleak and gloomy day. They do a difficult job with compassion, skill and care. They are patient and generous and are facing some of the toughest cuts our health care system has ever seen. Most amazing of all, they do it all while listening I am no longer Anastacia’s love.
Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the baby: Milk, sweat and tears from the frontlines of motherhood