At the Spa, They Have Better Magazines

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to whoever funded the nice waiting room at the Breast Care Center at UCSF, the one that looks like the place you sit while you wait for a beauty treatment at a so-so spa.

But you know, you’re not at a spa. Here are the clues:

• Bad magazines. At spas, you get to read Vogue, and Martha Stewart and People and In Style. Here, there’s a rack of magazines directly across from you and the selection is worse than what you get on Southwest Airlines when you’re in the C minus boarding group. (The one you’re in when you show up afater all the people in the C boarding group.)  Things like American Hunter (I’m not kidding), Golf (with a guy on the cover demonstrating a swing), and Tennis (Andre Agassi, farewell).
• The woman next to you is filling out a questionnaire in Russian, and she’s muttering things under her breath that don’t sound like happy spa talk.
• The chairs are really, really, really close together and there’s no fruit on the coffee table or tea in an urn to the side. You can hear the woman next to you breathing shallow worried breaths. Next to her, there’s a woman in a wheelchair who’s got an oxygen mask on her face. You try to maintain your privacy by looking up at the magazine rack and wondering why every magazine in it has a picture of a guy on the cover.
• The woman who comes to get you isn’t going to give you a massage. She’s going to smush your breasts into a machine that was not made for your comfort and convenience, but for that of the doctors who’re waiting to look at the pictures she takes.  The doctors who never even come out and say a word to you.  And she’s not going to tell you to breathe deeply, the way the nice massage therapist does. Nope. She’s going to tell you not to move and whatever you do… don’t breathe.

So I didn’t. Breathe that is. Next time, I’m bringing them some new magazines, so at least I have something to look at that’s sort of interesting. As for breathing?  I’m planning on doing more of it, even if they tell me not to.