'The Doctor Will Be With You Shortly': 21 Doctor Visit Memes for Patients Still Scrolling in the Waiting Room

Celeste Mello • Writer and Editor

Aug 11, 2026 6:30 PM EDT

Nobody looks forward to a doctor's appointment, I know. But they're full of little moments everyone recognizes. The paperwork. The waiting. The endless scrolling in the waiting room… You can turn that boring wait into a perfect occasion to scroll through memes!

Doctor's appointments have their own relationship with time. I believe doctors count time differently than the rest of us. You're told to show up 15 minutes early, so you do. You check in, fill out the paperwork, find a seat, and wait. Then your appointment time comes and goes. Twenty minutes later, you're still in the waiting room, and the front desk promises you the doctor will be with you "shortly." After a while, that word stops meaning anything. And getting there on time was only half the battle. Most appointments are booked weeks ahead, which feels like plenty of notice until the reminder pops up and you realize it's tomorrow. Now you're rearranging your schedule and trying to remember all the questions you meant to ask before the doctor calls you in.

The waiting room is a great environment for memes. A patient sits there flipping through a magazine that's been sitting there for years while another patient is watching videos at full volume and a kid has turned every chair into a jungle gym. The TV is playing a show nobody would ever choose at home. At some point, your phone becomes the only thing keeping you entertained. So you reply to a few texts, scroll through social media, check the time, and then do it all over again. You catch up with everything that has been going on, and you still have time left to keep waiting there. Your battery keeps dropping, and so does your patience until the moment comes. The doctor calls your name. That's the moment people get so overwhelmed with excitement because it's finally their turn that they forget everything they wanted to ask the doctor. So you answer what you're asked, forget what you came to say, but remember it later on the drive home. You tell yourself you'll write everything down next time. Odds are, you'll forget again.