Gate C-30

August 31, 2007
10 pm

I’ve been awake for almost 40 hours, and now I’m sitting in Hartsfield, waiting at gate C30 for my delayed flight that was supposed to depart at 7 pm. I am constantly suppressing my frustration at wasting 4 hours of my life waiting for my delayed flight to take off after a busy night on call, yet I find myself drawn into the lives of “normal” people (i.e. non medical people!) who also are waiting to depart.

There’s Jeff, the high school student applying to college at Hopkins, U of Chicago, Rice University, Wash U, with Hopkins and Chicago being his top two choices. I immediately judge him as a spoiled, but smart teenager, whose success is more so a product of purchased intelligence than inherent motivation and drive. He is wealthy enough to go wherever he wants for college and probably takes it for granted. I cringe at my own readiness to judge, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.

Jeff’s mom is disabled in a wheelchair – I suspect that her stick-sized lower limbs are the origin of her disability. From the mother’s raised voice and rushed words, I gather that they are about to leave the airport and cancel the trip – Jeff has too much “heavy and serious work” and the delayed flight will cause further exhaustion. His mother poses a question, it seems, to the entire gate-C30 crowd: How much will they really extract from the scheduled 1 pm tour of Rice’s campus if he’s so exhausted from the trip? How is my son expected to successfully complete his high school work load, waste time waiting for a plane to take off, and have enough energy to process a college campus tour? I certainly do not have the answers to these questions. Nor does God… perhaps.

There’s the greying middle-aged woman with the leopard print shoes and muffin-shaped earphones draped around her neck, waiting for her flight to take off to Mobile where her boyfriend – and his family! – await her for the long Labor Day weekend. Her shoes, the envy of a blond, overweight southern girl dressed in a white cotton spaghetti strap dress, only cost $36 at Macy’s. What a great buy! I can’t help but feel sorry for the leopard.

A man seated two rows away from me, dressed in an orange polo shirt and blue baseball cap takes a whiff of his inhaler. This reminds me that my future work as a pulmonologist is, to say the very least, important.

A pony-tailed girl sprints across gate C30, her rapid footsteps buffered by the aging fashion-less airport carpet, and 10 minutes later, a pseudo child-train has formed with a slightly taller Indian girl flying across the room behind her in pursuit. They have formed a transient friendship unalloyed by expectation or dead promises.

The children catch the smiling eye of a quiet dark haired Indian man dressed sloppily in a pattern-less blue polo shirt that loosely hangs above his pleated khakis. Either he remembers running in a busy public place as a child, or perhaps a child awaits him on the other end of his journey, or he is single and wonders when he can enjoy the playful nature of his own child. I saw this man catching my eye earlier in the evening, not in an act of flirtation, but in a questioning glance – he wants to know, am I from Atlanta, Houston or Mobile? What part of India? Why, at such a young age, am I desparately trying to catch some sleep on the cold blue vinyl seats of Hartsfield Airport? And what am I typing on my laptop?

I turn to my right. I see a man’s mole on his right lower chin before I actually see the man. It’s large. Next I see how the edge of his hairline on his forehead makes an almost perfect U shape, either reflecting the somewhat anal nature of his barber, or his receding hairline? I don’t know enough about receding hairlines to make any further conclusions.

Amidst all the personalities, the different destinations, the mutual frustration on this impending holiday weekend, I can hear the drone of CNN in the background. They are featuring a tribute to Princess Diana who died 10 years ago. The plasma television that awkwardly hangs from the ceiling in the middle of gate C30 manages to catch my full attention when the doctor who arrived at the crash scene to help resuscitate Princess Diana speaks about his experience. He has many pitted scars on his face that I easily spot on high-definition, and his speech is deliberate, much as the public would expect a doctor to speak.

Finally, to my left, people begin to file out from the gate. My plane has arrived! I will be home soon. My seemingly endless hours of wakefulness will finally come to an end. A very good end – I will pass out on my old bed in my old room, smothered by the coziness of home. I will awake the next morning to smells of south Indian cooking, with the whistling of the tea kettle. Perhaps I will hear the door creak open – my father will never change and it will be late in the morning – why hasn’t his daughter yet awoken? She has told him strictly and firmly not to wake her up that she has been awake for an ungodly number of hours.

I know what is to come and I ache for it from a place that I find hard to describe in words.

The Indian girl who was darting across the room has stopped and I have full view of her orange head band that contrasts with her thick, wavy pitch black hair. Her grin reveals the loss of several front teeth. As I realize that this will be my last physical exam for a week, I see the Indian man, sitting cross legged, with his long white socks exposed beneath his short pants, turn to his right and smile once again.

Yikes!

I haven't posted in nearly 2 months! I recently had a meeting with a faculty member to whom I boasted my right brained abilities. I felt guilty doing so since I haven't been so right-brained in so long. Maybe this has been the result of my crazy as *&^% 2nd year of residency, which is turning out to be harder than internship!

Anyhoo, I was in the airport at Atlanta this weekend tired and post-call, and I had this feeling I hadn't had in a long time... the feeling of words darting across my mind. It was fantastic!

Luckily I had my laptop with me and I was able to capture what words were coming my way (it's almost like they choose you) and what would have been fleeting thoughts became black and white. But of course, all writing has shades of gray...