Medecin du travail

Should be writing report cards.

Instead I thought I should tell you about my doctors visit. At work.

Last week at the private school, the workplace doctor came to visit. And we all had to go unless we had a note from another doctor. Which I didn't.

The visit was off to an ominous start when the secretary at work handed me an empty vial at the start of the day. Not only did I have to pee in a cup at work, but I also had to figure out how to discreetly get it out of the classroom in the middle of the lesson (too much information???).

Anyway, my appointment was right at the beginning of my afternoon class, and I guess the first appointment after lunch for the doctors. I was there right on time, but of course the doctors were late. They were smoking. They reeked. I thought it was funny that they also had a poster in the office that detailed the health hazards of smoking.

I should mention that this office was just a trailor that was parked in the parking lot outside the school. I walked in, and the first doctor wrote down some info, and made me do the vision test (a lot harder in French, that close up reading part). Then I went through to the next room to the next doctor, who wrote down basically the same information again, and asked me all sorts of health questions. In French. It wasn't too difficult. The one thing that he couldn't get over was how all us Americans (I had to keep reminding him that I was Canadian...) don't have records of our immunizations. Well we do, I told him. They're just safely stored away in a variety of different doctor's offices in Canada. Luckily I can remember having a tetanus shot recently, andI have a pretty good idea about the other shots that I've gotten, so that seemed to be good enough for him. And that was about it. He listened to my heart and took my blood pressure (normal, thankfully!), and sent me on my way. Pretty painless.

As this was my first visit, he took the time to tell me a little about why I was there. It is mandatory at all workplaces. Apparently its primary focus is to monitor people with conditions like diabetes and epilepsy, but he also said it provided the service of being an anonymous place for employees to report any abuse or sexual harassement that is occuring at work.