Day 5 – The medical exam

It rained again this morning which, in itself wasn’t the issue, but the rain caused many people to take taxis (出租车) to work and made it nearly impossible to hail one to take me 27km clear across Suzhou to get to the medical facility in time for my 9am appointment. You see, even though my physician in the US gave me a physical (which needed to include a chest x-ray and an EKG readout), China requires one done in country in order to obtain a work/residency permit. So yeah. Anyway. The taxi arrived at 8:50am, then got stuck in traffic, then dropped me off at the wrong location (about half a mile away) … The one good thing in all this is that there was no actual appointment that was missed; the facility seems to be a “drop in” type location.

The medical exam itself was quite interesting. My contact who’s helping direct what needs to be done for obtaining the work/residency permit did not mention I would have to bring 386rmb (~ $57) in cash with me, so … after registration and a visit with the cashier (payments up front, not after), the cashier kindly directed me to where the closest ATM was — a ten minute walk down the street! Now, walking 10 minutes is nothing for me, but where this medical facility was located made the walk quite interesting as it’s in a factory/industrial part of town. Also, the closest ATM was NOT on the same street. Thankfully Google Maps (hello downloaded offline areas!)  was able to point me in the right direction.

With cash in hand, I walked back into the medical facility, paid for my exam, and proceeded up to the second floor to begin the process. There were different rooms that you had to enter and each room had a specialist that was going to poke and prod you in a different manner. Height/Weight/BMI and blood pressure in one room, blood sample & urine analysis in the next, stomach ultrasound in the third, eye exam and EKG in the fourth, and then chest x-ray in the fifth — which happened to be back on the first floor.

The eye exam was rather interesting as unlike in the USA where you read a line of letters back to the medical professional administering the exam, in China you specify which way the character 山 is facing. They also test your color blindness, which apparently they weren’t as thorough in that category because I know that’s one exam that I will fail.

Once all the exams were finished it was time to tender my document showing stamps from each of the rooms. I thought it was time to head home, but no … I needed to get a copy of my passport to turn into the facility and get my photo taken to attach to my medical exam. No idea why that photo was required as they scanned my passport and used that photo to add to the printed document that I carried around to the various rooms.

At this point in the day I was getting hangry as I hadn’t eaten since the night before — fasting was required for the exams — and quite thirsty as I violated one of my rules for living in China: I didn’t have a bottle of water with me and man was I thirsty! Fortunately I was able to hail a cab with no trouble and made my way back to the apartment. Thursday there’ll be similar fun as I need to return to the medical facility to pick up my “certificate”, whatever that means. (Why can’t they just fax it to the hotel? Oh yeah, original copies of things are big here.)

Today’s word of the day: 出租车 (chūzū chē), meaning taxi.