A story about patience

On Wednesday Febuary 12th, 2025 after a half day at school I went with my mom to urgent care. Previously that same morning my mom had noticed that there were blood spots where my oldest cat Johnny who is 18 was laying down, she also noticed that he was kind of biting his tail around his butt so she had assumed that he was possibly passing because he is so old, for context my oldest brother was gifted johnny for his birthday before i was born. Well when she noticed the blood spots she had no other option than to check and thats where everything went wrong, while she was checking his butt area to see if he was bleeding he had spun his head around piercing his two fangs into my mom’s right pointer finger. We did know that Johnny does not like to be pet anywhere besides his head and neck but never expected him to ever bite anyone for it.

That same day my mom had work from 5am-2pm, she had cleaned off her finger after the bite making sure that it was clean and wouldnt get infected. She wrapped her finger with a bandaid and wore a glove while also frequently cleaning her hands since she works with food. during her day she had noticed that her finger felt very hot and knew that the heat was a sign of infection. So after school she picked me up and we went to urgent care to get her finger looked at. While we we’re at urgent care there was a couple people, some of them with family and some of them by themselves and it seemed like they have been sitting there for a long time. They all looked tired and uncomfortable like they have been sitting for a week straight. I knew that once we pulled into the parking lot and saw all the cars we knew we we’re going to be waiting there for a long time, but when we we’re inside there wasn’t a lot of people but I just knew since it was a hospital.

During the long stay in the waiting room there was a lot of commotion including a man pacing around by the kids area, another man on his phone talking to someone on the phone and seemed very upset and erratic. I wanted this visit to go by way quicker than it was already but it didn’t end. Almost 3 hours later my mom got called into a separate room but in the same room as us with a lady so her finger can be seen, and booked into the urgent care to be looked at by a doctor, after the line of people who were already there before us. While my mom was getting fully booked in, I was still in the same uncomfortable seat still waiting for her to finish up while my back was in agony because the way the seat was designed so your back was kind of bent. Eventually she came back and i thought that we were going to be moved to a room so she could be seen and given antibiotics but no…we had to wait even longer until her name was called to actually be seen by a doctor. After another hour or two but what felt like an eternity we heard her name being called and I figured “this is where my mom is actually going to be seen now”. But I was wrong. We were sat in a open area with other people in plastic chairs that we’re worse than the other ones and had to wait for another 30 minutes. While waiting for a doctor a lady with a desk on wheels with a pretty decent size computer on it and had started to discuss the amount of money this doctor visit would be.

I was really hoping that the lady was the doctor but I was wrong, which made the process feel even longer and was getting a little impatient but I knew that this would be beneficial for my mom’s health so we mainly just talked about random things the whole time which made the process go by a little bit smoother and than eventually my mom was finally seen by a doctor and she was given antibiotics to take for 14 days and 2 times a day and we we’re finally sent home and we had left the hospital and went to the car. When I stepped outside of the hospital I could feel the relief of finally being out of there, not because it was a hospital but because I was getting impatient, but I was able to pull myself through and make it out of there without complaining about when we could leave.

“Black cat” by @Doug88888 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.