The Amazing X-Ray Ride

It's health check time here at NAIST and everybody from the first year graduate students onwards are getting poked, probed and perforated. Height, weight, waist ("Do you Metabo?" You bet I do.), blood pressure, eyesight, hearing, EKG, blood sample, urine sample, chest X-ray and stomach X-ray. A health company has set up shop here at the university assembly hall for a few days, with buses parked outside containing the X-ray equipment. I have to say that people take health check-ups a lot more seriously here than I'm used to from Sweden. I've had more check-ups here the past five years than I had my entire previous life.

X-ray Bus

New to me this time was the stomach X-ray. The throat, stomach and intestines don't show up well on X-ray, so you drink something that does. The "something" is barium sulfate. Barium is a heavy metal, so it shows up great on X-rays. Heavy metals are normally a bad idea to ingest, but barium sulfate is not taken up by the body so there's no problem; it'll go right through you. To make sure your stomach is easy to see you're supposed to not eat or drink anything the night before or the morning of the examination - no breakfast, no water and not even coffee; if you think I'm normally cranky...

Anyway, the stomach is empty and shrunken (and complaining bitterly I might add), so to make it unfold you swallow a powder - baking soda, pretty much - that, together with a shot of citric acid produces carbon dioxide, the fizz in fizzy drinks. The gas blows up your stomach and makes it easy to see. Yes, you will want to burp a lot, and no, you're not allowed to; that would deflate your stomach. The barium itself is a cup of sweetened and flavoured muddy white sludge, rather like chalk dissolved in Calpis.

You lie down on a rotating table with handles for you to hold on to, then they tip the table around every which way and ask you to rotate on the table ("Now please lay on your left. Your left. Your other left.") so that the barium sludge spreads and covers your entire stomach lining. Occasionally they'll ask you to hold still and hold your breath to take an image. It's over in about five minutes, at which point the novelty has well and truly worn off and your stomach - hungry, gas-filled and dizzy from the constant rotation - is most definitely getting unhappy about the state of things. Afterwards you're asked to take a mild laxative and drink plenty of water to avoid constipation from the barium sulfite.

 
So, you drink too much sweet, heavily carbonated slurry, then go on a machine that flings you around until you feel disoriented and faintly sick. Once you've left you crave some real food and stomach medicine. If they'd add some greasy popcorn and loud music it'd be hard to tell apart from an amusement park ride.

Health Examination

Japanese health care is generally quite good (Jun Okumura has a good post on it), and my own experiences match that. If you're gainfully employed in Japan for instance, you will have a yearly health check. This may be different from Sweden I believe as I've never had such a check while living there - but then, I've never been a company employee there either so I'm not sure what the case is for normal people. The health check is mandated for every employee, but of course, exactly how that health check is being offer in practice can differ quite a bit depending on the employer. Most examinations I've heard about are fairly slow affairs taking half a day or so.

The health check this year was different - good, but different. I am currently employed through a staffing agency, and they of course have hundreds (or more) people spread out all over the Kansai area that all need this examination. So I get an envelope with directions to a clinic in central Osaka, a health form and a small sealable vial, both to be filled-in beforehand. I expect there to be quite a lot of people so I bring a couple of research papers along to have something to read.

Turns out I needn't have bothered. The place is indeed full of people, but the clinic staffs speed and efficiency would make an F1 pit crew dizzy. We all bring our filled-in form, with a number sequence already printed at the bottom, to the desk with the first number. The polite but oh-so-efficient nurse takes the urine sample ("Mr. Moren, the sample please"), and speeds us to the next desk, the path marked by a tape line. The next one, for weight and height is the same ("Mr. Moren, stand here. Thank you.") - blink - Eyes ("Look in here and read the last line") - blink - blood pressure ("Relax please. Quickly now.") -blink - heart, lungs and waistline ("breathe deeply .. and the tape measure - ahh, you've got metabo!") - blink - EKG ("lie here, lift your shirt") blink - hearing ("press the button when it beeps") - blink - X-ray ("Stand here, breathe in deeply, it's only radiation") - blink - blood test ("just one more vial Mr. Moren, no need to faint yet.") - blink - and... done.

All in all, the whole thing, from entrance to exit (head still spinning), took about 25 minutes. That's less time than I would normally expect to wait before even starting a normal examination. And yet, there was never a hint of sloppiness nor any feeling of it being rushed. Everybody even managed to be bright and pleasant throughout the whole thing (I was there early morning; no idea how that holds up over the day of course). Fun for all. And I certainly prefer spending my time in the lab over a hospital waiting room so I'm certainly not complaining. Kind of makes you wonder why ordinary visits take such amazing amounts of time though.