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[samhouston]

Today the school's teaching staff went on our annual field trip to what I think was supposed to be a hospital. I had heard weird stories about this kind of thing, but I figured the Baoshan steel district was close enough to Shanghai that the health facilities would have shed their third world flavor years ago. Silly Sam Houston! At least they bothered to build a floor over the dirt.

The first thing you notice when you walk in is the stench of the crapper. I thought maybe they had drawn a line there, that the rest of the place was a designated high-hygiene zone. Not so fast...

There were a few different things we had to do to get our forms properly stamped to ensure that if our little kids keeled over and died, it wouldn't be from contact with the teachers. We could go to any one of a few areas to begin our testing. Though it was more organized, and the people more docile than at your average stop at the local bakery, where the jerk with the bloodiest fists gets served first, it was still a bit comical from a colonial perspective. It was reminiscent of a FunZone romper room shindig where everyone queues up at various stations joking around and laughing. But there were no happy rewards to be had...no games, no rides, or Chucky Cheese pizza. Just the knowledge that 5,000 glorious years of existence had resulted in this dangerous facility that would have been condemned in the US a hundred years ago.

At our first station of health and total fitness, some clowns wearing white aprons were administering the blood tests from behind a window, like at the bank. There was a big box of presumably clean (or cleaned) needles by each highly trained and properly smocked professional RN. The area in which they worked must have been really sanitized, because they saw no reason to use latex gloves. While I can appreciate how much work goes into maintaining their standards of cleanliness, the pile of used needles sitting directly beside the box of cleaner ones gave good reason for pause. At least the victims could sit down while their bodies were being infected, but the chairs were more like ice cream parlor stools. No backs on the chairs, and no other chairs nearby to lounge in while waiting out the willies.

My colleague and I observed the assembly line of giggling Chinese as they struggled to contain their eagerness to get their blood taken. After a few minutes, we both decided that we'd wait until we found a better venue for this particular test. Also, I did not relish the idea of my inevitable loss of consciousness, and waking up with all the Chinese teachers with whom I work pointing and guffawing in my face. They laugh in my face enough when I make the mistake of practicing my new phrases on them, but this would have given them material for the next six months.

Wanting to try our luck somewhere else, we shambled over to the area where they were administering chest x-rays. Waiting behind a line of thirty or so of the most cheerful people I have yet to witness in China, I was reminded of that scene in Schindler's List where the women are all whooping it up, running around naked when the SS doctors arrive. What on this earth was there to be so happy about?

Waiting out in the main hall, we could see another white-smocked man hiding in a closet. Visibly bored, he was looking at a monitor that every thirty seconds or so would show a live image of someone's insides...ribs, beating heart, and a lot of mess. The door to the x-ray room was a normal wooden door, but there was a small radioactivity sign nailed to it, protecting everyone outside it from the nuclear blasts occurring mere feet away.

Once inside, I hesitantly stepped onto what looked like some prototype Sputnik-era laser weapon. Only after its gears and motors began to turn did I notice the duct tape and cardboard attached to some of its moving parts. The closet man was partially visible through a window, his head propped up by one hand, as he ever so skillfully gave my entire body a thorough dose of cancer. In thirty seconds I was back out of that room-sized microwave, thinking that I had nothing left to lose by going back to the teller to get my blood tainted.

One last stop to make in the blood pressure room. Another smock man. I hadn't heard any hocking and spitting or ear-splitting brakes in a while, so my pulse and pressure checked out ok. Then the "doctor" led me to an adjacent room and made me take off my shoes before laying down on a massage table. He began searching around under my ribs for something I guess the x-ray device was unable to locate, but found nothing. Another blue stamp.

No doctor's visit is complete without a check of the vitals, so begrudgingly I dropped my pants when asked. I thought he was going to do the old one-two sack check, but he wasn't interested in that. Instead, he produced a long, thin cotton swab and gestured like he was going to violate my splang with it. Hold on a second, I blurted out as I jumped back from him. I think he told me to calm down or something, and he quickly did what he needed to do while I fought to hold back rising convulsions. It wasn't as invasive as I thought it was going to be, but I still get the shakes thinking about it...

Maybe I should have just posted my question instead. My NATO colleague and I still need to get our blood tested. For what, I have no idea. Even management at the school don't know. But once we find out, where should we go to get stuck with some real honest to goodness, sealed and wrapped, clean and new needles? I'm sure there are better facilities than the disease fair we endured today.