Stool Samples and Crab Legs or Your Waste is a Terrible Thing to Mind

LOCATION: Houston Texas, USA
29 41' 02.43" N   95 27' 26.29" W
Elevation: 56 ft

Good news everyone, Heather has finally achieved her CMA!

We arrived in Houston for the orientation session and visa medicals and were greeted at the hotel with a package containing 3 vials each for our "specimens". I love the lingo the medical community uses for this embarrassing yet humanizing experience. I have never once used the terms "specimen","stool" or "movement" to describe my poo. Specimen sounds too Darwinian - "that's a nice triple coiled specimen". Stool is something you sit on at a bar or put your feet on not "hey, who left the floater stool in there?" And movement is something that Mozart might compose not "I just dry docked a soft serve movement!" Why can't they use normal terminology like my kids use: Apu; Big O'l Texan; Booty cakes; Blind eel; Bum brownies; Corn massacre; Down periscope; Hell's candy, etc?

This was certainly a first for a job offer and I would describe our experience not as a deja vu but, for Heather, it was a jamais vu (a feeling like she had never experienced this before) and she ended up barfing after she frisbeed a bun fudge. I, who has experienced the wrath of Giardia, had a presque vu (a feeling like I had almost experienced this before) and ended up making sure each vial had one kernel of corn in it from the corn-on-the-cob feast the boys and I had 2 nights before resulting in me producing a corn eyed brown trout when I backed the big brown caddy out of the garage.

Anyway, after gathering our products of Uranus and placing enough of it in the proper containers to displace the preservation liquid up to the red line, we went out for crab legs at one of my favourite restaurants in Houston. Trulucks has awesome crab legs!

The next morning we rushed off breakfast and coffee - less to the Aramco Services building to complete our medicals and, of course, hand in our vialed butt gnomes. After 6 vials of blood, one urine test, a vision and hearing test, lung x-rays and of course the ever pleasant hernia test cough, cough - we received our orientation to the Saudi Arabian/Aramco world. The orientation fortunately excited us enough to negate the humiliation we had subjected ourselves to and I think we are just ready to get the heck over there.