Waiting

Another year, another Valentine's Day, and still no sign of Mr. Right on the horizon.Or even Mr. Half-Right.It's odd, but Valentine's Day is beginning to affect me in the same way as New Year's Day. Which is to say: I find myself looking over the past year and assessing my life. In this case, my love life.Right now, for instance, I'm trying to remember two things: The name of every man I've ever loved and the name of every man I ever thought I loved.The first list is short. You could count the names on two fingers of your hand.

How much pain can you take? It may be a case of mind over matter, experts say. Brain scans of volunteers given a series of electric shocks demonstrated a variety of reactions. Some dreaded each successive shock, while others managed to keep what was coming out of their minds, according to a team of Atlanta researchers whose study was published today. Volunteers who dreaded the pain most were willing to endure more intense pain if they could get it over with quickly. Those who kept their minds off the impending shocks were willing to wait longer -- and endured less intense shocks as a result, the researchers say. The study may help scientists determine how a fear of pain plays out in everyday decisions, such as whether to invest in a stock or schedule a dental appointment, said Dr. Gregory S. Berns, a physician and neuroscientist at the Emory University School of Medicine who led the study.

A 22-year-old man was shot and killed as he waited for a bus to take him to work yesterday morning in Cross Country, a relatively low-crime area of Northwest Baltimore, police said. A gunman apparently approached Trevor Raphael Jr. about 7:10 a.m., shot him at least once in the back of the head and fled, police said. Raphael, whose mother said he had recently started working at a Jiffy Lube car center in Pikesville, was waiting for a bus in the 5900 block of Cross Country Blvd. - the same block where he lived in the Fox Glen Apartments, according to police.

As time ran out on Howard Golden, he seemed on fire to talk. He was chief judge of the Orphans' Court for Baltimore City, so he wanted to talk about court business. He had worked in the juvenile courts, so he wanted to talk about all those lost children. Or he wanted to talk about the awful business of waiting for a heart. "Not just my heart," he would say. "Anybody's heart. Anybody who's waiting for a heart, you don't know the terrible time they have waiting because the whole procedure's so bad."

Howard County Council members aren't having any better luck carving out district lines in private than they did in public.The council turned to closed-door meetings, conversations and number-crunching after a judge declared their first plan invalid in November. That plan, favored by Democrats and opposed by Republicans, was illegal because it was passed by resolution instead of a bill, the judge ruled.Council members are still at loggerheads -- and at the same place they were at the beginning of the process two years ago. Until boundaries are established, no one can file to run in next year's County Council election, and the election board cannot do its advance work.

Patients treated in Maryland emergency rooms have among the longest waiting and treatment times in the U.S., according to a national survey. An Indiana marketing firm surveyed 1.5 million patients treated at 1,500 emergency rooms in 2006 and found that Maryland ranked 45th, with patients spending an average 277 minutes waiting and being treated. The national average was 240 minutes, 18 minutes longer than last year, according to Matt Mulherin, a spokesman for Press Ganey Associates, the South Bend firm that conducts the annual survey.

While President Clinton's health care plan does address some major issues, it also misses the boat on what really concerns most Americans about doctors and health:1. Waiting -- How can a doctor, who spent 20 years going to school, not know that if you schedule 29 patients for 9 a.m. appointments then 28 of them are going to have to wait?Actually, 29 of them are going to have to wait.That's because the doctor doesn't come in until 10:30.What Clinton should have said about this Wednesday night: "Under my new plan, all patients must be seen by their doctors within 15 minutes of their appointment times.

WASHINGTON -- Two days and counting until The Deadline. It is the date carved in stone for crossing the line drawn in the sand, and all over the globe the hype, hoopla and handicapping continue as if the Super Bowl, not war, were at hand in the Persian Gulf.Congressmen speculate on how quickly a U.S. air attack would overwhelm the Iraqi ground game. Analysts fret about the weather -- sunny skies or a sandstorm for zero hour? And out in the world's bleachers, millions wonder if Iraq will cancel the whole matchup by withdrawing from Kuwait in the nick of time.

With concern mounting over the shortage of donor organs, a new study has found that the fate of Americans awaiting liver transplants may depend partly on their gender and ethnic background.After combing through 7,422 patient records, researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that women, Hispanics and Asian-Americans wait longer than white men. Meanwhile, blacks and Asian-Americans were more likely to die waiting than were Caucasians."There's an assumption that when people donate, organs are put to the most equitable and best use," said Dr. Ann C. Klassen, an instructor in the school's department of health policy and management.

We've all been there: The utility or appliance dealer says you must be home within some large window of time on a certain day for its employees to come hook up your phone or deliver your refrigerator. Then they don't show up. When that happened to Baltimore County lawyer Joseph T. Williams, he called Sears Roebuck & Co. to complain. He learned that no one could have come to fix his washing machine during most of the four-hour span he was told to be home because Sears technicians were in a regularly scheduled staff meeting.