Chinese Health Checks

Today I received my first exposure to the Chinese medical system by way of our official Health Checks. All foreigners who will have an extended stay in China are required to take a physical exam to ensure that they are not bringing in any diseases to China or are susceptible to any disease. The whole process was very interesting...

this morning at 8 o'clock we all met at the office and climbed on the bus to Zhengzhou (the provincial capital- about 1 hour away). we arrived at the clinic around 9:15; it was already very crowded... We found out immediately that the pictures our leader brought of us were not the right size, so we had to go next door to a photo studio to get the appropriate size. This "photo-studio" was nothing more than a one bedroom studio apartment attached to a beer distributor. We literally had to squeeze between an unloading beer truck and stacks of beer crates to even make it into the cramped room. Inside the "studio" was two beds, a sheet with a stool in front of it, a lamp, a shade and a small Chinese woman with a digital camera... one by one we took our pictures...

Little did I know at this point that my day full of interesting and surprising things had just begun. The line for registration was long and the wait took about 30 minutes before we were even through to processing... after the all of us were signed in we proceeded into the 'clinic area' where all of the different types of exam stations were located. One by one we were checked off on all of the essentials: blood-pressure, weight/height, eye exam, chest X-ray, EKG, Blood/Urine test and finally a sonogram. This experience was interesting because I have never been through a screening process like this, much less one so in depth and within one facility and all in a language that I can scarcely say that I understand... 

The sketchiest part for sure was the urine test. After having blood drawn, each person was handed a small, numbered specimen cup and instructed to "fill it half way and place it inside the corresponding number outside the restroom." The rack outside the restroom was exactly that: a rack with numbers on it filled with OPEN half cups of urine. It would have been so easy to contaminate the other's samples. I wonder how it is even possible to get an accurate test... I think that this experience just goes to prove that things are just done differently in China... A notion that I am sure I will be becoming more and more familiar with in the coming months...