Glutton for punishment

So I go to the Doctor about my pitiful back. It's torturous driving over there. The sitting hurts, the shifting of gears hurt, using the clutch hurts, pressing the accelerator hurts, but I make it over there. The actual seeing of the Dr. is very swift. She's a lovely woman, originally from Hong Kong and we get along really well. She thinks I might have pulled a muscle. I decide that it's time to get wonky hip x-rayed and tell her that my insurance ends on Monday. She concurs and sends me to radiology where, immediately upon entering the room, I find that I have in fact wondered into the third level of hell.

The waiting room is packed. There is nothing to read but handouts on catscans and fluoroscopies and the facility license as issued by the Texas Department of State Health Services. I wait one hour and check with the lovely and most professional and calmest front desk lady I have ever seen. She tells me that there are still seven people ahead of me. Oh my. I decide to go to lunch and come back. I get back 1 hour later and there are still 2 people ahead of me.

Then, then the facility takes lunch. Closed from 1 pm to 2 pm. Excuse me? Oh, it's not the whole facility that takes lunch, just half the staff. Oh, that's alright then. Finally, at 2 PM, they call my name and it's my turn. Yay. The actual x-raying takes like 2 minutes, then I wait and then they tell me I'm free to leave.

I'm just glad that I wasn't the dude who came in from Shreveport, LA to get an x-ray. Why he had to come all the way to Houston, TX (a 5 hour drive), I don't know, but he was letting everybody know that he waited so long he felt like walking back to Lousiana. Hah!