Poo Delivery

This past Monday I flew to Houston for an orientation at Aramco Services Company. The main part of the day was spent with a former expat's wife who gave several presentations on different aspects of life and work in the compound and the Kingdom. Her story was fairly typical of most that I've heard so far: she and her husband went over there planning to stay for a couple of years and ended up staying for 20! She brought her own personal photo album--it was helpful to see relatively recent and unstaged shots of the housing and compound.

Along with the presentation, there was a series of medical procedures one after the other throughout the day. They took blood (three vials) and urine samples, a chest xray, and gave me a TB skin test.

Prior to my departure, I received a package from them with two plastic sample vials--I had to collect some of my own poop and, using the little sporks attached to the inside of the lids of the vials, transfer it into each of the sample vials. The vials contained different liquid fixatives and after carefully sporking poo into the little plastic tubes, I had to close them up and give them a good shake. Mmm. It was a very unpleasant process all around.

Samples carefully sampled and vials tightly closed and labeled--I thought the worst part was over. Oh, no, not at all. I still had to get through TSA at the airport security gates! You know the drill: liquids, properly stashed in a plastic ziplock, must be taken OUT OF YOUR BAG and placed in the plastic bins.

Yeah, I could only imagine that conversation: "Ma'am, what exactly is this?" "Um, that would be samples of my POO!"

Fortunately, that ended up only being a product of my own fertile imagination. No problems with TSA, poo safely delivered to the Aramco medical office in Houston.