It was a long day at Bascom Palmer yesterday, the majority of the time spent sitting and waiting in crowded corridors. For the most part nobody talks, except to the person they came with, though yesterday a woman spoke to us in Spanish. I told her, in Spanish, they I don’t speak Spanish, and she switched to English.
By 5:30, she and everyone else except one middle-aged woman had disappeared, either home or into one of the examination rooms. We were finally called into one and when we emerged it was 6 pm. We had arrived at 2. This would have been less annoying if I could have spent the time reading but I refrained before my eye exam so I could see the chart better and after that it was difficult with dilated pupils. One elderly woman, obviously new to the procedure, moaned in panic to a passing doctor that since seeing the technician her vision had become blurry.
At checkout, we ran into the woman who had talked to us earlier. She was with her husband. I asked if they lived in Miami. No, she said, Guatemala. They fly up once a year to see her husband’s ophthalmologist. She pulled out her phone and showed us pictures of her garden in Guatemala City; large modernist sculptures stood on the grass. Then a picture of her daughter, standing with their granddaughter in Antigua. Another daughter, she said, is in Berlin, studying to be an ophthalmologist. Hania of course asked about the political situation in Guatemala, and the woman mentioned last year’s elections, saying, tentatively, “we hope for the better.” Then we exchanged business cards. I have never been to Guatemala.
