Employment Physical

When I was 28 years old, I went to work for a large, Fortune 500 company. My job was in the same locale where the corporate headquarters were, and the company had many employees in the area. So they provided many services for its employees, including a health clinic. It wasn’t quite full service, but the clinic did offer a lot. That was in 1984.

The letter I received from the company with my official offer of employment included a paragraph toward the end stating that I would have to undergo a mandatory physical examination at the time that I started work. It stated that this would be at no cost to me, that my employment was in no way dependent on the outcome of the examination, and that this was not a matter of concern.

On my first day of work, I met at some length with the Human Resources representative who “on-boarded me”, with things like social security information, next of kin, employment agreement, how to make out the paycheck, benefits info, etc. Toward the end of the meeting with her, she called the company medical clinic and scheduled my physical, and the appointment at the company health clinic was only a day or two off.

I arrived for my appointment, and the nurse (yes, it was an actual RN according to her badge) gave me a medical history form to fill out in the waiting room. I completed it and returned it to her, she skimmed it, and then she promptly took me back to the inner sanctum of the clinic. This place was highly efficient – Not much waiting for anything. And it was done practically assembly-line style. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me since this company had large manufacturing operations, and assembly lines and on-time delivery came naturally to them.

The first stop was the restroom to collect a urine specimen. This was before widespread drug testing, so there was no security to be sure the patient didn’t cheat on the urine test. Then there was a vision test in another room, which the nurse administered. She then took me to another room where she told me to take off my shirt and shoes and socks. There were hangers and shelves along the walls to leave these things. The nurse recorded my height, weight, and blood pressure.

The next room had an examination table on it, where a med tech did an EKG on me and also took blood samples, all while I was lying on the table. From there, the next room was a respiratory function study, where I breathed into a machine as instructed by a different technician. In the next room, I had a chest x-ray. Then finally the last room was a hearing test, with a chamber that the patient would sit in while wearing headphones and pressing a button when hearing sounds. These rooms were all connected, one to the other without going out into a hallway.

The nurse then took me back where my shirt and shoes were and told me to put them back on. In the testing area, I and a couple of other male employees were walking around partially disrobed. It made me wonder about the female employees. I could only think that there were times for males only and different times only for female employees in the testing area of the clinic. But I never found out.

The nurse then escorted me to a different part of the clinic where there was another waiting room but was small. She told me to wait there until a doctor called me in for my examination. I had to wait a little while, which I later realized was so that the doctor could get the test results and interpret them. It seemed like there were maybe three examination rooms. No other patients were in the waiting area at the time, although I think two of the examination rooms seemed to be in use. Then the door to the third examination room opened, and the doctor walked out to call me in. She was a young woman, maybe not any older than I. This was the first time I had a medical examination by a physician that was my age or younger.

I went into the examination room with her. The room had an examination table, a desk with two chairs, and a curtained off area for disrobing. The doctor told me to sit on the other chair at her desk. She reviewed my test results with me, which was everything except the blood and urine work. These she said would take a couple days to get back from the lab, she’d review them at that time and contact me if there was a problem. She told me I had a slight hearing deficit in my right ear. I asked her follow-up questions but my questions seemed to annoy her. In fact, I formed an impression that this doctor didn’t really like working there.

The doctor then told me to strip to my waist and also take off my shoes and socks. I could do this behind the curtained off area in the examination room. She had me sit on the examination table, and she then examined my head and neck. One thing I particularly remember about that was she donned a glove and inserted it in my mouth and palpated my sublingual glands and submandibular glands (the ones under the tongue) with her ungloved hand under my chin. I don’t think I’ve ever had that done by anyone else other than the dentist. She then listened to my heart and lungs with the stethoscope.

Then the doc had me lie down on the table to palpate my abdomen and check my pulses. She also raised and lowered my legs and bent my knees, probably to determine if I had any limitations of my lower body. She next told me to stand up for a hernia exam. She did NOT tell me to take down my pants and underpants but I knew perfectly well to do that. The doc sat down on a stool facing me. She inserted her gloved index finger into my inguinal canals while I turned my head and coughed. She also examined my testicles but not my penis. The doc then told me to turn around and bend over the table with my elbows down on the table. She did a brief rectal and prostate exam. She told me there were tissues for wiping in the dressing area behind the curtain and I could get dressed and leave. There was no follow-up discussion. And I didn’t hear anything about the results of the blood and urine tests. I recall that I was at this clinic for almost two hours that day.

I came away thinking that this employment examination was a perfunctory thing mostly designed to protect the employer, and not so much to benefit the employee. I had another such examination three years later at the same clinic, with much the same experience except with an older male doctor who was about to retire. It was somewhat more abbreviated than the first exam. There was a third clinic visit another 3 years off that was reduced to just blood and urine tests, with no examination, except they mailed me the results. By then, belt tightening was resulting in mostly shutting down the employee health clinic and these types of services are now long gone. That said, this clinic did offer special medical services for employees from time-to-time and I have a story along those lines that I’ll share in a future blog.

About that female doctor, I later learned that she had just finished her residency in internal medicine and had come to work for the company only two months before me. The building where I worked was right next to the health clinic and also right next to the employee cafeteria. I used to see her frequently at lunchtime in the cafeteria dining with the nurses that worked at the clinic. She never acknowledged anyone else that I saw. I learned that she resigned from the company after about a year and ultimately became a rheumatologist, working at a nearby medical school. I hope her demeanor improved.

A couple years later, my wife started working for another large company, but a different one. Her company also required an employment physical and ran an employee health clinic, although smaller than ours. Her experience seemed much less “assembly line” than mine. Also, my wife became casually acquainted with the one doctor (a woman) who worked at their clinic. They occasionally lunched together and my wife sometimes talked to her about various health matters. She maintained this acquaintance until the doctor left the company, when their company also shut down their employee health clinic – These types of employee services being a throwback. My wife told me she had a rectal exam in her employment physical but not a pelvic.

I’d be interested in hearing other people’s stories about their employment physicals.

Medical Equipment image from the Wikimedia Commons