The Waiting Room

I was going to write a post about the querying process, the paths I took to develop that small piece of work that intends to exemplify everything you have poured into your manuscript, and the ways you can endure rejection and possible success, but then I found myself sitting in a beige room, waiting for my husband to get out of surgery, and I realized I had a much, much different story to tell.

The waiting room was more elegant than most libraries I have visited: alcoves of modern furniture separated by frosted privacy panels. It smelled clean, the air cool as people passed in and out. Conversations and laughter ebbed and flowed. At first, the waiting was delayed by the people around me. My mother and father-in-law offered water and pleasantries, but all that lagged as we individually wrapped ourselves in the comfort of our phones. I wish I could say that waiting for the surgery to be completed was traumatizing or worrying, that I fretted the entire time or wondered if the work being done would be done well. Instead, I fell asleep, secure in the knowledge that this surgery was one of the most common in the field, that my husband had, himself being a surgeon, complained about how boring and uncomplicated it was.

I woke, groggy, as the attending surgeon explained to us the results: the appendix had been inflamed but had not burst and everything else was in its right place. He at first proffered his card to my husband’s parents, my presence, as usual, confused with someone else (not being Asian, looking too young to be married). Quick deferral resolved the issue. And that was it. My husband’s parents left, happy to report to his siblings that he had no complications.

Then I was alone. I had not realized how large the waiting room was or how empty it could be, the maze of couches unable to hide the lack of murmured conversation, the cold that seeped through every layer of clothing and numbed the feet. No one sat at the nurse’s desks. No one was left, having come and gone before the midnight hour.

What they rarely describe in movies or TV shows about surgeries and the ER is the wait after surgery, the time in which life partners and parents wait for the anesthesia to wear off, for their loved one to wake up. As far as medicine has come, the science of forcing a mind into its subconscious is still imperfect. Faith in surgeons is easy for me. I live with one. I understand how seriously they take their work, how they handle failure, and how hard they are on eachother to keep standards high. Sleep and the science of it, to me, is a deep unknown.

As I sat in the waiting room, the witching hour more than fulfilling its promise, I found myself more anxious than I had been during any other part of the process. When I had waited with my husband for the surgery to start, I had his constant assessment of his own pain and his analysis of what the surgeon was going to do. Even his expression of pain was a comfort, because I knew he still felt. Within the confines of my mind, the windowless room growing colder every minute, I fell into a state that cut off my ability to create, to process, to focus on any one thing.

While my husband dreamt under the supervision of watchful nurses, I became numb with waiting.

Now, outside of that room, I am able to relate that feeling to the process of querying my novel. A piece of yourself, a partner with which you have poured your heart into, is cut off from you to be measured and observed by the professionals who determine whether or not the vital signs are strong.

A nurse appeared. I perked up, instantly aware of her presence as she made the long walk past me. She saw me, ignored me, and walked to an unknown destination and back again, her purpose unknown.

Her expressionless face told me, “I am not here for you. I am not your husband’s nurse.”

And so I returned to my numb state, waiting once more, unable to push the door open myself without that single correct person to open it for me.

This happened more times than I can count in the two hours I sat in that increasingly claustrophobic room, pacing and charging my phone and looking back and forth between the door and the clock, unwilling to even make the walk to a vending machine or bathroom. The strange nurse would leave the place beyond the doors, make her walk to that unknown somewhere and back again, ignoring me each time.

This. This is how it feels to wait for responses to your queries. Often, agents pass by you, their rejections as simple as, “I am not your agent. It isn’t to say your loved thing isn’t great, but I am looking for something else.” They start to all look the same, those emails in a plain white background in plain black text. There are some who look at you, recognize your existence, and say, “Maybe. Let me check.”

But nothing can compare to the moment the door opened and I saw someone I recognized. The male nurse who had helped us while we waited for the surgery. His eyes scanned the room, looking for me. I stood up, heart in my throat. He smiled and said, “He’s awake. You can come see him now.”

After almost a year of querying, revising, and querying again, I’ve had someone open the door for me. It isn’t anything solid, but they’ve offered me the chance to do my own type of surgery to fix the thing I love so much. And this, this I have confidence in. Just like my own surgeon trusts his hands, I trust my own to do the work that needs to be done. And one day, when the work is finished, I hope to create something that will be assessed and said, “Yes. That is good. The recovery may take a while, but we’ll have this out in the world walking on its own eventually.”

I wish I had something inspirational to share with you, a promise that one day, you, too, won’t be left in the waiting room. But we don’t get promises like that as writers. We only have our own two hands and eachother to wait with, sharing in the conversation and celebrating the small successes.

That is something. Sometimes, it is all we can ask for.