Everyone who has spent time near a hospital knows the particular quality of its waiting. Time thickens. The clock on the wall seems to keep different hours in a waiting room than it does anywhere else in the building. You come to know the vending machine, the water cooler, the exact number of chairs, the faces of the strangers who become, for an afternoon, your companions. You wait for a name to be called, or a phone to ring, or a door to open and a face to tell you — before a single word is said — what kind of news is on its way.

This month's word is Waiting.

It is the waiting room, of course: the hard chairs, the old magazines, the corridor that smells of nothing and everything. But it is also the longer waiting that illness asks of us. Waiting for the result of a scan. Waiting for the biopsy, the letter, the call that will divide a life into before and after. Waiting, as a clinician, for a bed to come free, for the bloods to return, for a patient to turn a corner in the night — or not. Waiting to feel like yourself again. Waiting, sometimes, for an ending, unsure whether to wish it nearer or further off.

There is a suspended time in the middle of not-yet-knowing, and most of us have lived in it at one point or another. That is what we would like you to write about — your waiting, or the waiting you sat beside someone else through.

In Common is our monthly invitation to write to a single word, and to be read alongside others doing the same. If this is your first time with us: everyone is welcome, first-time writers most of all. You need only have something true to say.

How to take part

  • Send your piece by 30th September to narrativesmedicineheart@gmail.com, with the subject line "In Common: Waiting".
  • Up to 300 words, prose or poetry. One piece per person.
  • Tell us how you would like to be named — full name, initials, or unnamed — and, if you wish, a short line about who you are.
  • If you write about a real patient, please protect their privacy: seek their consent, or change the details that would identify them. Our guide on writing about patients can help.

At the end of the month, we will gather the pieces that move us into one collection, published here and on our Substack (https://heartbysdmhi.substack.com), so that we can read them together, as many voices on common ground.

Tell us about your waiting. We will be here — reading, and, as always, replying.

Write to us at narrativesmedicineheart@gmail.com.