If you are reading this then chances are good that you are sitting in a waiting room of some sort. The folks at Harris Publishing have done a good job of making sure that their publications are placed anywhere people might spend time waiting. One of the spots where more people seem to end up waiting the most is in doctors’ and related medical service offices. It always makes me smile when I walk into a doctor’s waiting room and I see someone reading Idaho Falls Magazine. It means that they are either excited to learn about what is happening in Idaho Falls or that their Smartphone battery is dead.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic spawned the boom in telemedicine, sitting in a doctor’s waiting room was one of those life experiences common to everyone. As a child, I remember the sense of dread that filled me as I waited. If the reception area had Highlights magazines then waiting would be better. I could spend my time trying to find the hidden objects in the puzzles. If it was a dentist’s office then it didn’t matter. I knew the end was near.
Nowadays there are all kinds of comfort dentists out there with all sorts of things to make the visit more enjoyable. When I was a kid my dentist didn’t even believe in Novocaine, so clearly comfort was not a big concern of his.
It used to be that the doctor’s offices were scattered all over town. None of their buildings were very flashy, just good solid structures that were easy to find.
In our neighborhood, our kid’s pediatrician’s offices were located right next to their elementary school. How convenient was that? But somewhere along the way something with the tax laws must have changed regarding doctor’s offices. Now it seems that so many of the doctor’s offices are McMansions. I remember being blown away when I walked into the lobby of one of those new medical services buildings and was greeted by the sight and sound of a two-story waterfall! As I was prodded and probed, I remember wondering how much of my bill was going to pay off the indoor Niagara Falls.
Like many other cities, we have also experienced a centralization of medical service providers that are logically close to our hospitals. In just a matter of years, what were formerly spud fields along Sunnyside is now a hamlet of healthcare providers. Each edifice is a little grander than the next. I can imagine a time a thousand years in the post-apocalyptic future when some archaeologist unearths the complex of professional buildings and hypothesizes about a temple complex where a cult of witch doctors offered sacrifices to the various deities responsible for feet, teeth and skin.
Whenever I visit a new medical provider, I’m always sure to plug the address into the map feature on my phone. More than once, I have almost missed an appointment because I was lost driving around in the medical maze, finding therapists for parts of the body I didn’t even know you could break. Lost, I resisted the temptation to call Life Flight to come and rescue me because I knew there was someone out there who might truly need their services. While some parts of the world might be thankful to have a box of band-aids and some aspirin, we are awash in some of the best medical care on the planet.
The ongoing virus situation makes you appreciate the wide variety of talented medical professionals who have forsaken the big bucks of the big cities to join us little folks living in Idaho. I pray all those “Best Places to Live After the Pandemic” lists on the internet don’t tip too many people off to what we have here. Hopefully, their Smartphone batteries will run out before they read about us.
Click here to read more of the September issue of Idaho Falls Magazine.