Health Check

     Last week I had a health check, which is needed for the temporary residence permit we hope to get soon.  Terry has already had this exam (twice--see my last blog), and Leah doesn't have to get one because she's under 18.  Both Terry and I were accompanied to a local hospital for our exams by Amy, a young Chinese woman with excellent English, who is employed by the local company that's managing Terry's current Environmental Defense Fund employment contract.  Amy's sole job is to accompany foreigners for required Public Security Bureau interviews and health checks to get a residence permit.   

     The first step at  Kou An Hospital was to sit in a large waiting room with about 40 other people getting the health check, and fill out a data sheet and a health history.  I waited my turn to present this paperwork with my passport and 3 visa photos, to have yet another photo taken and finally to have a digital fingerprint taken.  After that, we stepped up to the pay window and I handed over 680 RMB (just over $100), which was the slightly higher VIP rate.  This enabled me to step to the front of the lines at the various stations and get the whole thing over with as fast as possible.  Normally VIP-anything kind of bothers me, but I wanted to get out of there ASAP.  Not only have clinics never been my favorite place to hang out, but moving fast was also respectful of Amy's time.  She said she was extremely busy because everybody seemed to want to get things done before the New Year holiday this week.

     For the next 45 minutes Amy shepherded me to various rooms along the hallway off from the waiting room. A nurse in a crisp pink cap and uniform appeared now and again to look at my paperwork and direct us to another room.  I had 4 vials of blood drawn, an ecg, an ultrasound, a chest x-ray, a blood pressure check and even a vision test.  The last stop was at the restroom for a urine sample.   In all, I think I dropped into 6 rooms.  There were a few people in line outside each room.  No doors were closed except for the x-ray and in the restroom, although there was a curtain  drawn halfway across the room for the ecg and ultrasound.  All the hospital personnel seemed skilled and fairly pleasant, and most spoke some English.  The efficient assembly line approach made a lot of sense for this health check process and helped make the cost reasonable.  To have all of these services done at a U.S. clinic would have cost much more.  Only a couple things made me slightly uneasy.  X-ray machines always do.  Also, at home I'm used to having the covering on exam tables and pillows changed and the surfaces disinfected, after each patient leaves the exam room; this didn't happen, although nothing seemed especially unsanitary.  And then there was the squat toilet in the restroom:  familiar, but with unpleasant associations from past travel experiences.  

     To my understanding, the health check is mainly to screen for TB, HIV and mental instability, all of which would make a person's presence in China undesirable.  I'm not sure exactly how they check for mental instability, although maybe the process itself is the test:  waiting around in a rather narrow hallway with dozens of other people for your turn to get poked, prodded and zapped would tend to reveal problematic behaviors.

     I was the only non-Asian person going through the health check that afternoon.  When I asked Amy why all the other people, most of whom looked Chinese, had to go through the check, she said that many of them were probably from Hong Kong and had jobs that required them to sometimes cross the border and work in China--drivers, for example.  That would help explain the vision test.