Ce n’est pas sans raison que l’on nomme patient celui qui est pris en charge par la médecine et qui devient objet du soin. Si le terme de patient renvoie à l’idée de souffrance et de passivité, il évoque également l’attente. Or, la première chose que fait un patient c’est attendre. La salle d’attente n’est-elle pas, le plus souvent, le premier lieu que fréquente le malade et celui dans lequel il passe parfois le plus clair de son temps. Il a donc de bonnes raisons de devenir cet être paradoxal que nous nommerons le patient impatient. Mais cette impatience, qui peut parfois être une source d’agacement pour les médecins et les soignants, n’est-elle pas finalement un signe positif manifestant le désir du patient de devenir l’agent de sa guérison ?

It is not for no reason that when medicine takes care of someone, this person is then referred to as the “patient” who becomes an object of care. If the word “patient” refers to the idea of suffering and passiveness, it also alludes to the idea of waiting. Indeed, waiting is the first thing patients have to do. Most often than not, the waiting room is the first place in which patients spend most of their time. Then, a patient has good reasons to become this paradoxical being: the impatient patient. But to some extent could not this form of impatience – which can sometimes be a source of annoyance for physicians and caregivers – become a positive sign and show the patients’ desire to become the agent of their healing? Indeed patience and impatience are characterized by ambivalence. If patience expresses the idea of suffering and enduring, it also exhibits the virtue of someone who is strong enough to accept adversity and life's suffering with calm and equanimity. Conversely, impatience is often seen as a flaw but it is also an expression of the will to go on living and overcome adversity, which can therefore play an active and salutary part. This is the heart of this ambivalence that we are trying to approach in this article in order to show how patience and impatience are not mutually exclusive but may still be in a way the positive symptoms by which the patients’ capabilities can manifest and express themselves. So there is no contradiction in the idea of an impatient patient. Rather, it is by helping the patients to advance on the narrow ridge separating patience and impatience that caregivers can accompany them on this difficult path. Disease is actually a set of expectations. Being sick is to be forced to enroll in some form of temporality. Being sick is to experience differently the passing of time and this is all the more true when disease leads to hospitalization. The temporality of hospital is particularly burdensome. On the one hand, we have the temporality of caregivers, which is often made of urgency and precipitation and, on the other hand, the temporality of patients, which stretches to infinity and is often perceived as empty and agonizing. We must therefore try to reconcile these forms of temporalities – that are sometimes conflicting – to turn the hospital into a truly hospitable place that can accommodate and reconcile the temporalities of both sides.