TURNS OUT I DON’T HAVE TUBERCULOSIS

       In order to work and live longterm in France, part of the deal is that you have to go through a medical exam and get your lungs x-rayed. As you might imagine, the immigration office for Paris’s district sees hundreds of foreigners a day. Their system is set up like a medical visit factory. 
A slow moving factory, but a factory nonetheless. 
All the foreign people get pushed through the rigmarole like cattle. Each individual step only takes 5 minutes, but the whole thing takes hours because of at least 30 minutes of waiting between each step.

         When I arrived at the office, I handed my very official pieces of paper to the desk lady. Then I had to sit and wait for a while until she called my name and some other people’s names and led us to go wait in another room where even more people were waiting. This second waiting room was surrounded by doors that would occasionally open to reveal white coat people in little rooms. They would call some waiting people inside and then shut the door. Eventually my name got called and a woman in the little room asked me to hide one eye and read off some letters and then to hide the other eye and do the same. Then I was ushered back into the big room to do some more waiting.

         A long while later my name was called again. This time a different white coat lady showed me into a closet with a door on either side. She told me to take off all my clothes from the waist up and then walk through the opposite door. OK.

         On the other side of the door was a big room with two women and a bunch of equipment. One woman asked me if I was pregnant while the other slapped a heavy black vest around my guts. They pressed me up against the x-ray machine and ordered me to inhale deeply. Then I was ushered back into the closet to redress and go do some more waiting.

         Another long while later, yet another white coat woman called me into a different little room. She had my x-ray up on a screen. I said “that’s strange,” meaning that it was strange to see my insides. She said no, actually, my x-ray is of normal healthy lungs. Well, this was good news.

         We talked about general health and she gave me some advice about prescriptions and how to find clinics around Paris. Then she handed me my x-ray print and let me go.

my insides

         So, now I’m a legit foreign worker in France and I have all my stamps and everything! I hung my x-ray from my ceiling as a sort of trophy.