The Waiting Room (Grimed)…

We never wanted to be here. No one wakes up craving this, the flicker‑buzz of half‑dead fluorescent tubes, the sour stink of disinfectant layered over body odor, baby vomit, old coffee gone bitter in the corners of paper cups. The air tastes like pennies and ammonia. The chairs stick to the back of your thighs, vinyl cracked and sweating decades of strangers into the foam.

We sit in this purgatory because we’re hurting. Because the pain won’t stop, the cough won’t quit, the bone won’t set itself. Because someone, somewhere, told us this was where healing happens.

But we’ve learned the truth: healing doesn’t live here. What lives here is contempt disguised as triage. Indifference wearing latex gloves. Bureaucracy with a stethoscope slung around its neck like a trophy. White coats like priests guarding the altar of insurance; you don’t get through unless you confess correctly.

We’ve been told to be patient, literally patient, to wait, obey, condense our suffering into soundbites they can chart and code. We are stripped of names, reduced to bar codes on wristbands that itch like shackles. We are instructed to sit quietly in our own decay while they decide if our misery is marketable.

And in the stillness, that thought grows louder: Why are we bowing to people who treat us like burdens? Why are we apologizing to those who should be apologizing to us? Why are we expected to feel empathy for their schedules when they feel no empathy for our pain?

Why are we worshiping a temple built on our own backs?

The God Complex…

We were told doctors heal. That was the myth. The bedtime story. The PR campaign. But the truth? Doctors don’t heal, they judge.

They stand over us in white vestments, stethoscopes swinging like rosaries, clipboards held like scripture, and they weigh our worth. Married or unmarried. Fat or thin. Black or white. Worth saving or worth discarding. And in the silence between their questions, we hear it: the quiet arithmetic of bias, the sacred calculus of contempt.

Ask the pregnant woman in Tennessee; denied prenatal care because she wasn’t married. Not unfit, not unsafe, not even unhealthy. Just unmarried. The doctor didn’t see a patient; he saw sin. And in the eyes of this new priesthood, sin doesn’t get care. Sin gets exiled.1

Ask the fat woman whose tumor grew unchecked because every symptom, every plea, was reduced to three words: “Lose some weight.”2 Ask the Black woman whose skull leaked cerebrospinal fluid for months because no one believed Black pain could be real.3 Ask the chronic pain patient whose request for relief triggered a code red, drug seeker, red flag, liability; as if surviving agony was proof of criminal intent.

This is no accident. This is design. Conscience clauses and moral exemptions written into law. A system that hands scalpels to narcissists and tells them they’re gods, and worse, tells us to worship them for it.

We are not patients in their eyes. We are problems. Burdens to be triaged, lectured, humiliated. Obstacles to their metrics, their bonuses, their self‑image as heroes. They sneer at us for being six minutes late while they’re six months behind on our lab results. They scold us for “noncompliance” when their own indifference is the disease.

And through it all, they demand reverence; the bowed head, the grateful smile, the whispered thank‑you for the crumbs they sweep from their tables. They want worship, not wellness. They want confession, not care. They want obedience, not healing.

Disgustipated…

We are tired. Bone‑deep tired. The kind of tired that seeps into the marrow and sticks to your soul like hospital soap that never rinses clean. We are tired of waiting rooms that smell like ammonia and despair. Tired of butcher‑paper altars that crinkle under bare skin. Tired of staring at scuffed linoleum while daytime TV flickers overhead, Judge Judy berating strangers while my life rots in the margins of someone’s chart.

We are tired of condensing my pain into bullet points you can bill for. Tired of performing my suffering in neat little monologues so you can click boxes and nod like you’re listening. You’re not. You never are.

We are tired of being polite about it. Tired of folding myself into origami cranes just to fit your protocols. Tired of tasting copper from biting back screams you’d call “noncompliance,” because god forbid the sick get angry about being ignored.

We are tired of the god complex you all wear like a second white coat, polyester divinity, cheap halos bought in bulk from the medical supply catalog. You memorize Latin names for pain and call yourselves saviors, priests of misery, clerics of contempt, shepherds guiding the sick into paperwork purgatory.

We are tired of being reduced to bar codes, QR codes, ICD‑10 codes, 723.4, 338.29, 304.91, “Chronic, non-compliant, drug‑seeking.” You preach compliance but refuse to meet us halfway. You scold us for being six minutes late while you vanish for six months behind your own backlog. You lecture about “lifestyle choices” while withholding care out of moral disgust, as if healing is conditional on your personal approval.

We are tired of the way you erase - altering notes, rewriting charts, laundering threats out of the record like they never happened. We are tired of begging for basic relief and being treated like a criminal. Tired of being gaslit, humiliated, abandoned, and then expected to say thank you for the privilege.

And somewhere between the waiting and the bleeding and the begging, something inside us snapped.

We are done.

We are disgusted so badly it constipates me, disgustipated, jammed up with rage that won’t pass until every last one of you hears it.

Kiss. Our. Asses.

Listen to me, and listen well: No. Get used to that. We know you haven’t heard it much in your career, We know it’s a hard pill to swallow, but swallow you most certainly will.

No.

No, we will not crawl through your hoops just to be humiliated.
No, we will not be your guinea pigs.
No, we will not be your dancing monkeys.
No, we will not rearrange our lives to worship your schedule while you shred ours.
No, we will not apologize for being sick, for being in pain, for daring to need help.
No, we will not inhale your pompous lectures about “lifestyle choices” when you refuse to even hear our voices.

You want respect? No.
You want gratitude? No.
You want reverence? No.

You want us to beg you for your time, attention, and help?
Fuck yo

If we don’t need you, and we don’t, then what happens to your temple?

What happens to the altar of fluorescent light and sterile plastic when the faithful stop kneeling? What happens to your sacraments, the charts, the codes, the little paper gowns, when we refuse to play priest and penitent? What happens to your gate-keeping when there’s no one left at the gate? What happens to your ugly fucking Maserati when we stop paying for it?

You wanted us to diagnose ourselves. Fine. We’ll do it. You wanted us to manage our own pain. Fine. We’ll do that too. You wanted us to tell you what’s wrong and then thank you for ignoring it. Fine. We won’t tell you a goddamned thing anymore, and we will treat you with the condescension and contempt that you have treated us with.

You’ve trained us out of reverence. You’ve taught us disgust so deep it curdled into indifference. We’re past begging, past bargaining, past caring. You don’t get our obedience. You don’t get our gratitude, and you are not worthy of our acknowledgement.

You get silence.
You get empty waiting rooms.
You get no one left to breathe life into your toxic ego.
You get the hollow sound of your own footsteps in corridors built for gods no one fucking believes in.

You’re not saving lives, you’re gate-keeping survival. You don’t heal, you sort, you label, you discard, and the Hippocratic oath has rotted on your tongue.

If you refuse to heal, stop calling yourself a doctor.