I was number 47.
Not on a deli ticket. On a list a woman with kind eyes and a clipboard wrote my name onto, in pen, on a Tuesday in February, after I had spent the better part of three weeks getting myself to the place where calling the number felt possible. She said the wait was eleven weeks. I did the math on the subway home. Eleven weeks was the second week of May. The forsythia would be out. My dog would have had two more birthdays. I would, statistically, have cried in approximately nineteen public bathrooms between now and then, if my recent average held.
I am not making fun of myself. I am telling you what waiting does. It turns you into an actuary of your own life.
There is a particular kind of arithmetic that happens when you are number 47. You start to weigh the urgency of your own pain against the imagined urgency of strangers. You think: surely the woman who is number 6 needs it more than I do. Surely number 32 is in worse shape. You begin to perform a kind of triage on yourself, and the verdict — every time, in my experience — is that you are not bad enough yet. Which is its own diagnosis. Which is its own thing to carry around for eleven weeks.
The worst part is what gets quieter.
By week four I had stopped telling people I was waiting. By week six I had stopped expecting the call. By week eight I was, in some small way, ashamed of the original phone call — that woman three weeks of preparation ago, who had needed something so badly she had begged a stranger for a slot. I had become embarrassed of her urgency. The waiting itself had performed a small surgery on my willingness to ask. This is, I think, the part nobody tells you. The wait is not a neutral container. It is doing work on you while you are inside it. It is teaching you to expect less, ask less, hope less. It is pre-shrinking the help so it fits the diminished version of you who eventually receives it.
When the call came in week ten, I almost didn't pick up.
The system is not a person. The system is a hundred thousand decisions made by underpaid intake coordinators and overbooked clinicians and insurance algorithms designed by people who have never been number 47. The waitlist is the architecture's confession.
Here is the opinion. I'll just say it. A waitlist is not a queue-management problem. It is a moral problem dressed up as a logistics problem. Every week a person spends as a number is a week the help arrives smaller than it would have. Eleven weeks of triaging yourself against strangers is not the same person walking into the appointment as the one who picked up the phone. The clinician on the other side will not meet the original you. They will meet whoever survived the wait.
I think about this when people describe care as a journey, which is a word I have come to dislike, because journey implies forward motion and a map. What I had was eleven weeks of standing very still in a hallway, hoping the right door would open before I forgot which door I was waiting for.
I want care that knows my time is finite. I want care that doesn't make me prove my desperation with attendance. I want to be introduced to a person who has already agreed to see me, by a third party who has done the vetting I am too tired to do. I want the eleven weeks back. Not because the waitlist was unconscionable on its face — most of them aren't, individually — but because the cumulative effect of being made to wait, repeatedly, across a life, is its own kind of injury, and it deserves to be named.
It is May now. The forsythia is, in fact, out. I am writing this from a kitchen table on a Wednesday, and I am, by any reasonable measure, fine. The dog is older. I never went to the appointment.
I keep meaning to call and tell them to take me off the list.