Top Ten List: The Sickest Looking People in the Doctor’s Waiting Room

Waiting rooms are basically Ground Zero for humanity’s decline. You sit under those florescent lights, breathing recycled coughs, surrounded by people who look like they’ve lost bets with their immune systems.

1. We are sorry to inform you that this individual is no longer listed among the living. His description is being withheld pending notification of next ok kin.

2. The Twitching Straw-Haired Pianist
Next to him the first woman on our top ten list, a woman with hair like straw and hands that twitch as if they are trying to play an invisible piano. Her knees bounce furiously, her lips mumble to some unseen jury, and her eyes dart at every sudden sound. She reeks of the chemical sweetness of antipsychotics. Schizophrenia mixed with anxiety is the likeliest cocktail. She might last two years, but only if she does not run into traffic on the way out.

3. The Meth Awareness Campaign
Across from the fish tank, a teenage boy leans back, skin pocked and pallid, hoodie pulled tight around his thinning frame. His head lolls like it is too heavy for his neck, and he wipes his nose on his sleeve every thirty seconds. He has the classic look of someone auditioning for a meth awareness campaign. If he does not collapse by next spring, he will probably make it to twenty-one.

4. The Bourbon Barrel
A man in his sixties sprawls in a chair with an expression that suggests every organ inside him is fermenting. His belly distends like a watermelon left in the sun, and his ankles are sausages stuffed into socks. Cirrhosis from a lifelong commitment to bourbon is the likely culprit. One year left, but the end will come quicker if he keeps treating the liquor store as his pharmacy.

5. The Sweater Full of Bones
Next to him is a skeletal woman wrapped in a sweater three sizes too large, who shivers as though the room is an icebox. Her teeth chatter, her lips are purple, and her arms show the track marks of too many bad decisions. Her hollow stare suggests both heroin and despair. A month, perhaps two, unless she mistakes the bathroom floor for her bed one last time.

6. The Coughing Mother
Near the reception desk, a mother with a hacking cough clutches a toddler who looks healthier than she does. Her face is gray, her cheekbones cut like razors, and her chest wheezes with every breath. Tuberculosis or untreated pneumonia is my guess. She may see her child start kindergarten if she is lucky.

7. The Human Water Balloon
In a corner sits a man so swollen his wrists and ankles have disappeared. His face is slick with sweat, and he breathes as though every inhalation requires a signed permission slip. Congestive heart failure is written all over him. Without a transplant, he has perhaps eighteen months, though every Big Mac is shaving off days.

8. The Scratch Queen
A young woman with paper-thin skin scratches at her arms like she is digging for buried treasure. Red welts and scabs climb up her neck, and her eyes are sunk into bruised sockets. Meth or eczema? The wild look suggests the former. Nine months before the drug or the street takes her.

9. The Walking Dialysis Flyer
Slumped under the coat rack is a man with a yellow tint to his eyes and skin that resembles candle wax. He smells faintly of ammonia, which is never good when one is not a cleaning product. Kidneys failing. Dialysis may buy him a few years, but without it he will be fertilizer by winter.

10. The Coffin Breaker
Finally, perched on the edge of a chair is an old woman who looks like she stepped out of a coffin to make this appointment. Her skin is parchment, her lips barely exist, and her hands tremble as if holding on to the last scraps of life. Every breath is an audition for the final one. Prognosis: any day now, though she might outlive us all out of spite.

Outro
There you have it, ten portraits in human expiration, each one a reminder that the waiting room is not simply a prelude to the doctor’s office—it is a prelude to the grave. If you ever find yourself among them, pray that the magazines are more current than the patients.

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If listicles are your bag, visit our top-ten lists archive and fill your boots.