Medical Checkup

In order to obtain a residence permit here, you must go through a medical checkup.  Sounds simple enough, right?  You go to a hospital and they run a bunch of tests on you:  TB, HIV, a chest x-ray, a brief physical, etc.  I dreaded it, but only for the usual I-hate-hospitals reasons.  I envisioned that I would be sitting in a typical exam room wearing an too-small hospital gown as I waited for a doctor who would come in and perform a physical and then send me off to a technician who would draw my blood and run some tests on me.  "It'll probably take a few hours to get through all of us," I decided, "so I'll bring a book."

Nope.

First of all, we weren't in a hospital, exactly -- at least not as I've experienced them in the States.  It was an old, drafty government building, almost reminiscent of the post office back home in Oberlin.  We stood in line for registration, were handed a piece of paper and some labels, and had our picture taken.

On the piece of paper was a list of rooms with a blank space next to each for an initial.  Our task?  To embark on a medical procedure scavenger hunt.  Go to each room, undergo a test, and get a signature.  All the exam rooms rooms but one were on the ground floor, and each was small but had an almost floor-to-ceiling window with no curtain.

Because the scavenger hunt sheet was in Chinese, each room was its own little adventure.  For the chest x-ray, I went into a dark little room and, upon direction, put my backpack on a shelf.  Then the technician pointed in front of the x-ray machine, told me to hold the protective sheeting ("Hold!"), and stepped out to take the x-ray.  When he came back seconds later, he told me to leave.  All told, it took no longer than two minutes.

Some exams were more alarming, especially given that the technicians barely spoke to us.  When I went in to get my EKG, the tech pointed at an exam table.  I lay down on it.  Then -- with no preamble -- she yanked my dress over my head, put a variety of clamps and suction cups all over my body (the clamps were a light pinkish color; the suction cups were frog green), seemingly at random, waited a minute, took them all off, handed me a paper napkin, and pointed at the door. 

Some were amusing.  I walked into one exam room completely clueless about what the exam would be.  There were two techs in there, a man and a woman.  Obviously I couldn't understand exactly what they were saying, but the tone was universal:  idle venting.  Never pausing in their bitch session, the man had me stand on a line and read off an eye chart.  After I'd read two letters, he cut me off and sent me to the woman.  She indicated that she wanted me to open my mouth wide -- I did -- and then pointed to her ear.  I turned my head so my ear was pointing towards her.  She made an impatient noise and pointed to her ear again, vigorously this time.  I tucked my hair behind my ear -- maybe that was the problem?  She pointed again.  I made a confused face.  Finally, saw what she was looking for (what??), rolled her eyes and signed off on my paper, shoving it at me.

Oddly, this process -- totally dehumanizing for me -- made me notice the humanity of the techs.  These weren't machine-like automatons; they were government workers, doing a job that involved mindless repetition.  Because of monotony of their individual tasks, bits of their personalities shone through -- just like at the DMV or the post office.

There were the two techs in the eye, ear and throat room: clearly bored to death, and coping by bitching and venting -- maybe even about the same topics each day.  There was the EKG lady, who was brutally efficient: just getting through each exam as quickly as possible.  There was the woman who drew my blood, and was probably new; she yanked the needle sideways on its way out and then told me curtly to hold the wound for two minutes while simultaneously handing me a pile of papers and telling me to move along.  (When I took the paper she was handing me, she yelled at me to put my hand back on my arm.  Choose, woman!)  

(Days later, I have a bruise that makes me look like a heroin addict.  Just in time for the first day of school!)

And just as I was feeling thoroughly objectified, there was the woman who did my ultrasound.  I lay there on my back (dress up once again) as she poked around on my belly, smearing the gel around.  She moved me onto my side ("Side!") and poked around some more.  So far, this seemed in keeping with the other techs.

But then, as I was righting myself, wiping off the gel and pulling down my dress, she pointed to me and said something in Chinese.  I pulled out my confused face again (it's been getting a lot of mileage recently).  She looked embarrassed, but pointed to me again -- this time more clearly to my dress, a blue one covered in birds that I got from Target for sixteen dollars -- and said, slowly: "Bee-yoo-ti-ful."

And I grinned.  And she grinned.  And I thought:  You are a human that I like, and you can see that I am a human that you could like, and in another world where we both spoke the same language, we could be friends.

And then I said, "Xie xie!", was bustled out to my next exam room, and became a cog once again.

I keep thinking about that glimpse of connection, though.  It felt good.  It felt great.  I'm probably extrapolating about a lot of these people -- I could be totally wrong!  Maybe the pair of techs in the eye/ear/throat room were talking about how much they loved Van Gogh.  Maybe the tech who drew my blood was just bad at her job, not new and unsure.

And maybe the ultrasound lady was just being nice, but I don't think so.  In her case, I felt a moment of recognition that I can't shake.  It was such a little thing, but it makes me feel as though while I'm a foreigner here, I'm not completely unknown.