It’s quite something to be sitting on a lime-green, wipe-clean chair, your tongue pinned to the roof of your mouth by fear, strangers in scrubs walking past briskly every few minutes, while Firework by Katy Perry pours out of a portable radio with the sound quality you might expect to find at the bottom of a crisp packet.
This week, I spent an hour in a medical waiting room in a funk of uncertainty. My soaked poncho hung over a nearby door; a woman behind me read a book in Spanish; someone knitted in the corner. Weaving us all together were the tinfoil-on-a-filling beats of commercial radio. Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen as I stared out of the window at a climbing frame and felt the sweat between my breasts. Dance With Me Tonight by Olly Murs while being shown to the toilet to give a urine sample. Torn by Natalie Imbruglia as the person behind me was called into their appointment.
If this sounds like criticism, it isn’t; not really. I was incredibly lucky to get this appointment, away from the main hospital, attached to a community centre, where I could be seen within 24 hours of my first phone call. The staff were so kind that at one point I found myself apologising for troubling them first thing on a Tuesday. It was calm, clean and comforting. But it was also awash with a medley of mid-00s dance tracks and hair metal love songs that felt about as incongruous as having the reception staffed by someone dressed in a gorilla suit.
There was a sign explaining that they have the radio on to protect the confidentiality of patients at reception, which is admirable. But you do wonder whose job it is to pick the station. When I went to the orthodontist at 13, to have the wires around my teeth tightened by stainless steel pliers, I noticed that the twinkly-eyed sadist was tapping his foot to MMMbop by Hanson. When I had a wart removed at 20, I looked at the doctor’s face through a cloud of dry ice as Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart came roaring from the radio and thought: well, you’ll never be able to put that in a script.
Apparently, there is evidence that music in waiting rooms can improve patients’ reported stress levels. That said, I have just read about a 2012 study in which “patients exposed to live western popular vocal music, performed by a music therapy student with guitar self-accompaniment, reported greater satisfaction with their visit”. I am clawing at my throat in horror at the idea of sitting in a waiting room, palms sweaty, knees shaking, while a 20-year-old with an acoustic guitar strums away in the corner, mouth set in what can only be described as his “plucking face”.
Medical settings are not always enlivened by pop music, of course. Sometimes, it’s telly. I remember sitting in the waiting room of the labour ward where I had my son, facing a television screen the size and brightness of the sun. Through a haze of contractions, urine samples and back-rubbing, I realised that the whole room was watching a 3am gameshow involving – as I remember it – a giant gold coin and someone swinging on a rope.
Likewise, at a recent appointment at an IVF clinic, my friend spent 20 minutes watching a television chef whose shirt was unbuttoned to somewhere around his colon, cooking a piece of salmon on the Food Network. Was it distracting? Definitely. Was it helpful? Not entirely.
I would like to thank every member of staff who looked after me on that dreich and dismal day. They do a difficult job with compassion, capability and care. They are patient and generous and up against some of the most stringent funding cuts our health service has known. Most amazingly of all, they are doing all that while listening to I’m Outta Love by Anastacia.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
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