Peace Corps Application - Part 10

We Have Been Medically Cleared!!

On December 8, 2008, the Peace Corps sent Jessie and I letters in the mail indicating that we are now medically cleared. Jessie's letter is slightly different than mine. She is "provisionally qualified for service that support individuals with asthma." While her asthma isn't particularly bad, she still needs to be in a country where she can get advair, albuterol, or any other meds she may need. We have no idea if this affects our original nomination. I wonder if there are countries that we automatically can't be placed in, or if we just need to be placed in a location that is near a medical facility. I suppose that is a question for our placement officer.

Overall, the road to medical clearance was not terrible, with two exceptions. First, on November 5, 2008, I was sent a follow-up letter from the Medical Office. They wanted me to go back to my doctor because I am overweight and they want to make sure it wouldn't affect my service. Those of you who know me, know that while I am not skinny by any means, I am certainly not dangerously overweight. The problem is, the Peace Corps Medical Office has never met me before. So, they ran my height and weight into a BMI calculator to determine how fat I am. Unfortunately, I scored over a 30 on the BMI scale, which labels me as obese! Now, if you look anywhere on the Internet, you can see that Body Mass Index (BMI) is the most ridiculous way to measure a person's health. It doesn't take muscle mass vs. body fat into account. It is just weight vs. height (with age and sex thrown in for good measure). By the BMI standard, for me to be in the normal weight range, I should weight 155 pounds. I would look anorexic if I did that.

Anyway, after a brief bought of anger/annoyance/amusement, I made an appointment with my doctor to check my fatness and to get some more blood work (I had a couple of slightly out of range liver levels). He said that I am not obese and filled out the form that they sent me. My blood work came back normal. I faxed everything back to the medical office about two weeks after that.

The second issue that Jessie and I had came up about a week ago. You see, Jessie is much more diligent than I am about calling to find out what is going on with our status. Thank goodness for that. When she called to find out if they had received all of our faxes, they checked her file first. Medical had marked her file and said that all faxes were received and they were waiting for my file to be complete. So, they check my file. Medical had marked my file and said that all faxes were received and that they were waiting for her file to be complete! Unfortunately no one had cross-referenced the two files yet, so they were both on hold. Again, good thing Jessie had called in, otherwise who knows how long it would have been before anyone noticed.

Where are we at now? Well, I believe we are now in for a long waiting game. Since we are not set to leave until next September, we really can't get an invite for another 3 months at the soonest (unless they move up our nomination). We could end up waiting all the way up until about 6 weeks before our departure date. So, we have a long way to go. Hopefully the wait is all we have to deal with. If there are budget issues, are departure could get screwed up too. Hopefully we won't have to worry about that, though...