I've wanted to do a thorough checkup since few years ago and never got around doing it. Today i finally went to a medical centre at Lucky Plaza and did the checkup, and it was under company's cost.
Uh huh, our HR has recently added this new benefits for the regional staff in Singapore Asia Pacific HQ. And the package is quite a comprehensive one. It includes blood test, urine test, stool test, chest x-ray, ECG, and also pap smear and breasts examination for females. What was not included was the HIV test from the blood sample, and i paid SGD40 out of my own pocket to add this in.
So, this is the first time i got poked at two private parts by a stranger while i'm fully awake. The last round i got poked at the backside was back in year 2005 when i did a colonoscopy, but anaesthesia was administered on me and i was deep in sleep, not feeling a thing. This time i felt every moment of it. And boy oh boy, it sure wasn't a pleasant experience even though it was a quick process.
Knowing that i was going to do a pap smear, i specifically asked for a female doctor when i called for the booking. Then today, the doctor i saw was a young and pretty female doctor with a nice pair of legs. She asked me a few questions on my lifestyle, my medical conditions and the medical history of my family members. When she heard that my dad died of colon cancer, she told me that i should do colonoscopy every 5 years. So i guess it's time for me to be put on anaesthesia again and get poked in the asshole.
I asked her about my migraine and she said it may be stress induced. She told me not to be alarmed unless the occurrence of migraine gets more frequent.
Then after the Q&A session, she asked me to go behind a curtain in her room to undress myself totally (yes, even the bra and panties) and changed into the patient garment. After that, she asked me to lie on the examination bed and she pulled down the top of the garment and started checking my breasts. I felt rather uneasy and did my best to not look at her at all.
Well, the following procedure made me feel even more uneasy, or should i say uncomfortable. She asked me to bend my knees and open up the legs a bit for her to perform the pap smear. This is the first time i ever had a lady (beside myself of course) looking at this part of my body, and i gotta keep telling myself that "she is a doctor, she is a doctor, she is a doctor" just so that i would not feel embarrassed.
The entire procedure took less than 3 minutes, but it was quite unpleasant. For those who do not know how this is done, you can always Google for it. Simply put, the doctor will use a device to spread open the vagina, then she will scrap some sample cells from within using another device. See, as if it wasn't embarrassed enough to open up your legs for a stranger to look at your private parts, the stranger actually touches it, opens it up and pokes inside!
Next is to collect the stool. Initially i thought i was supposed to defecate and i had been wondering how the heck i was supposed to do it when this is not something that i can squeeze out anytime i want. No worries, the doctor will do it for you. Hey, after poking the hole in front, why not poke the other hole behind too! So she did just that to get some sample of the stool, and bear in mind that i am fully awake when she did that. I do not even want to talk about how it felt, even though it was only for a very brief moment and the medical tool she used was quite small (i didn't see what it was as i was lying by my side with my back facing her, but i could feel that it wasn't something big).
The rest of the procedures were the usual - checking of weight & height (i saw briefly that the measurement showed 166cm and 54KG), eye test (eye sight and color blind test), blood test (i got poked again but by a needle this time, and it was quite painful and i got bruises at the arm area where the blood was extracted), taking urine sample (the usual way of course), ECG test (i needed to unbuckle the bra for the nurse to lift up my shirt and paste the ECG electrode pads at the chest area), and x-ray of the chest (gotta changed into patient garment with the bra removed).
By the i completed all the procedures, it was only about 10am+ (my appointment was at 8.45am), and i had actually taken half-day leave today, thinking that it was gonna be long with all the different types of tests. I went straight to the branch office after that and kinda wasted my leave.
The report will be out in two weeks and if everything is fine, they will just post the report to me. If there is anything wrong and the doctor needs to talk to me they will give me a call and i will have to collect the report personally.
I hope i will not get a call from them at all.
Labels: life
