Medical Mayhem

Part I.
As I mentioned before, Qatar requires a medical exam of sorts - blood drawn and a chest x-ray - in order to secure a residency permit. They keep tight reigns on who enters and exits the country.

Earlier this week I received an email instructing me to reclaim my passport (hooray!) and report to a shuttle bus the next morning for the medical visit (boo!). Fortunately for me, a friend of mine had to endure the medical exam as well, so she picked me up from my building and we arrived with a few minutes to spare before the scheduled time of departure. Unfortunately for everyone, the air conditioning on the bus did not work, making for a very long ten minutes that we sat and waited for some unknown reason an even longer twenty-some-odd minutes on the road to the medical center.

Now part of the benefit in working for Qatar Foundation, which sponsors Education City, which contains the campus of Texas A&M University - Qatar, is that we receive expedited processing for those administrative tasks associated with obtaining our residency permits. In the email directing us to retrieve our passports, we also learned that upon our arrival at the medical center someone would meet us and help guide us through the process.

After our mobile sauna experience, our guide arrived over 10 minutes late, by which time three-quarters of the group had split up to try to figure out how to navigate the hellish labyrinth that is this medical center dedicated to residency permit processing. Once our guide did manage to grace us with his presence, the ladies and gents had to part ways, meaning that we ladies still had to flail through on our own. After receipt of a stamp for "registration confirmation", we stood in a line to have blood drawn. No names called here; only waiting in lines and barcodes - on the paperwork, on the test tube for the blood sample.

Unusually for me, I escaped any troubles giving blood. They then herded us into a waiting room for the chest x-ray where we waited for over an hour before discovering that "the systems were down" and would not function again for at least a few hours.

With no other options we regrouped and schlepped back to the non-air conditioned bus where we were told that we would have to return the next day for the chest x-ray. Confoundingly, we were also told that we could not return on our own and that this x-ray required an appointment. I saw no evidence that day that having an appointment mattered.

Part II.
Our second visit transpired much more smoothly, though it involved much perspiration since we still had to travel in the steam machine. After separating the ladies from the gents, we walked into the waiting room, sat down, and immediately the workers shuffled our party to a different x-ray area. There they took us in groups of about ten where they directed us to change into gowns in either one doorless room or the hallway. (Nothing like a shared physical experience to grow closer to one's colleagues.) Luckily the x-rays took little time and soon we had all re-enrobed and trekked back to the bus. After roasting for another half an hour waiting everyone to finish, our guide collecting our passports and paperwork (ugh) and we sweated back to campus.

While terribly inconvenient and uncomfortable, I now find myself one step closer to securing my residency permit, and, more importantly, my exit visa, so that I may leave and reenter Qatar. In the meantime, I have devised a Disneyworld Epcot national experience ride for Qatar in which park-goers step onto a bus with the heat turned to 105 degrees and have to navigate different tasks in return for stamps, including giving up your passport, stripping to your skivvies and organizing paperwork in order to exit the ride. Think Disney might be interested?

In other news, my new camera has arrived!  I'll write another post all about it, but for now I leave you with a couple of photos I took from my balcony.

 

 

XO,
JZog