Warm Fluids

On my desk at work, there were these green forms sitting in a brown envelope for the last few weeks. They were papers that were required for the medical examination that takes place for all teachers and students in Japan’s education system. The students had their checkups earlier in the year and just last week the teachers had theirs done.

The forms on my desk were all in Japanese of course, so I couldn’t understand anything except for where to write my name and birth date. There was also a woman in a long white coat, one of the school nurses, who kept coming to my office for updates on how I should go about my examination: where and when to go, which forms to take, and such. The bulk of the examination took place last Friday, and today, I went to a clinic to have my chest x-rayed.

For the check up, I went with another English teacher to a room where stations were set up each portion of the exam. The first thing we did was to each hand over a small plastic vial filled, to the appropriate line, with our urine. We were supposed to take these vials home to get a sample of our first pee of the day, but I didn’t know this, so mine was quite fresh and still warm. I had also taken a multi-vitamin in the morning, so mine was the most neon-yellow of all the vials placed in the plastic tray.

Next, we handed in our forms from the brown envelope to make sure we filled them out correctly. I can’t read Japanese and hadn’t filled any of it our, so the teacher helped me through each form. I diligently answered questions about my allergies and medical history; I told them that I am not a smoker and that I consume about 3-5 servings of alcohol per week.

After the completion of the form, we had our height and weight measured. Everything is metric of course, so my numbers were 182cm and 80.9 kg. I can now respond to my students’ questions in numbers they actually understand. The person who took the measurements, marked these numbers down on my form, handed them back to me, and I was off to the next table where I had my vision checked. To check my vision, I looked into a small device and reported the position of a certain circle with a hole in it over a series of trials. It was either facing ‘ue,’ ‘shita,’ ‘hidari,’ or ‘migi’ (up, down, left, or right). As the examiner, this time a woman, marked my results, which she told me in English were “perfect” (with my glasses on), my good eyes managed to spy 3 glass vials that had been slipped into my brown envelope. I turned to the teacher beside me and asked, “are they going to take my #$%@ing blood?” He told me that they were and when I looked across the room, sure enough, two stations over, there was another teacher with a needle sticking out of his arm – at which point, more profanity ensued.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with having my blood taken – although I do generally avoid it whenever I can, but isn’t this a procedure that I would normally have to agree to in advance? Maybe I overreacted a bit – and maybe I could have been a bit more proactive in establishing for myself just what this medical examination entailed, but to me, it seems common courtesy to inform someone in advance when they are going to be punctured by a sharp object.

In all fairness, after having my blood pressure checked, the man who took my blood was very quick and I hardly felt anything. Nonetheless, the teachers behind me enjoyed laughing at me when I turned my head so as not to see the stabbing-through of my arm.

The test finished with a hearing exam and then I went for an x-ray of my chest today. I’m not sure when I’ll get my results, but I’m pretty sure that this is something that I’ll have to ask about.

For today’s photo, I was preparing to do a portrait workshop with the students of the photo club on Wednesday. I thought that I would take the opportunity to photograph my kitchen knives. My apartment came mostly fully-loaded with everything except knives and futons. I bought these shortly after I arrived and they’ve been excellent to me.

***On another note, my pen ran out of ink today and my pencil ran out of lead, so when I wrote most of this post at work today, I used mostly borrowed ink.***