I Might be Pregnant

I might be pregnant.

Well, that's what my health insurance company thinks.

My workplace was offering a health screening recently.  It was part of a "Know Your Numbers" campaign.  It was a number of diagnostic tests all rolled into one convenient quick appointment.  The appointment was held in a large conference room that was turned into a makeshift doctor's office.  Activities included a check of your height and weight, a blood pressure measurement, a couple of high level health questions, and drawing a small sample of blood to screen for the major diseases like diabetes amongst others.

Those checks went along smoothly.  I won’t have the results from the blood test for a while yet, but the collection process went well.

The interesting and funny part came at the beginning of the process.  When I entered the room, I see about twelve different medical professionals strewn about the room.  Some were directing people through the paperwork needed, some were doing the height, weight, and blood pressure checks, and the others were doing the blood draws.

I was directed to fill out a sheet of info.  It was basic biographical stuff like name, mailing address, birthday, gender, etc. and the legal stuff so they could have my permission to do the tests.  No big deal.  At the bottom there are the only three truly medical type questions.  The first question was if I used tobacco products within the past year.  That’s simple.  No.  The second question was if I had a disease that would prevent the drawing of blood or place myself or others at risk.  That’s simple as well.  No.

The third question was the funny one.  It asked if I was pregnant or if there was a chance that I was pregnant.  Now normally when these types of medical questions come up in a questionnaire, males just skip these and go on.  Vice versa for male specific questions.  This is nothing new to you, we all do it.  I skipped it and returned the form to the frumpy lady, likely in her mid 50’s, across the table.

She took a quick glance at it and barks back at me, “You need to answer the three questions I told you to answer earlier!”  She had plainly and directly pointed out those questions when she had handed me the form.

Now keep in mind that I had not given her any sort of attitude during my brief stay in the room.  I had been courteous with everyone I had interacted with at that point.  I didn’t give her any reason to be mad at me.  I had even printed neatly and darkly so that the triplicate form could be read on the bottom sheet.

I quickly thought, I don’t need a confrontation here.

I curtly answered her without being mean about it, “I did answer those questions.”

In response I received a very mean, “You did not answer the third question!”

I then reacted.  I didn’t need to be taking this abuse when I hadn’t even done anything to provoke it.

My response was very direct and blunt and delivered with an edge to it, “I’m a male.  It’s impossible that I’m pregnant.  There was no ‘Not Applicable’ option, so I correctly ignored the question.”

 

Her nastily delivered reply was, “Well you still need to answer ‘No’.”

I was handed the form back.  As I was picking up my pen again to acquiesce to her demands, a thought occurred to me.  I should just put an ‘X’ in the ‘Yes’ box just to mess with everyone.  The thought made me chuckle to myself.  I was chuckling at the thought, not at her.  That was not how she interpreted it though.  

She glowered at me for a while after that.  I turned and moved onto the next station for the blood pressure check.  She was probably still boring a hole in me with her eyes the whole time.