I’ve now been sitting in the waiting room at Stanford for 5 hours. We arrived a little after 5:30am. On the wall in the waiting room is a TV screen similar to the arrival and departure screens at the airport where you can track the progress of flights. Only in this case you are assigned a secret code so you can track the progress of your loved one.

Lori started out code orange, which meant she was in the building. A few minutes later she went code yellow, indicating that she was in pre-op. This is where I was supposed to get a chance to see her before the surgery, but the nurse brought her purse out and that was it.

Shortly after 7:30am she went to code green, indicating that she’s in surgery. This status is expected to remain the same for 5 hours. So right now the board is looking pretty boring. There are already other patients who have gone on to red for closing, blue for the recovery room phase 1, purple for the recovery room phase 2, and even grey for discharged.

Here is where my logical mind has a problem with their use of colors. Their use of the yellow, green and red stages sort of make sense if you think of them in the traffic signal sense. But when you throw in the other 6 colors it becomes harder to see the relationship. I would have designed it so that it went in the order of the spectrum starting with purple and ending with red.

You can probably tell that I’m pretty bored at this point.