No Smoking!

In addition to a thorough background check, the State Department also requires their employees (and the employee's family) to have a thorough medical exam before they get sent abroad. This makes sense, as you wouldn't want to send someone with medical problems to the middle of nowhere with inadequate medical care.

So today Kevin and I went to the doctor. He went first while I watched Penny, and I went second. The doctor was an osteopathic surgeon who also specialized in giving physicals to airline pilots. (They are required twice yearly. Now you know.) He had a lot of airplane stuff in his exam room, and there was also a lot of information posted about how to quit smoking. He asked me if I smoked, and then if Kevin needed some information on how to quit smoking. He had some good information and some tricks and some products. He was your man when you wanted to quit smoking. I just smiled, nodded, and said, 'Oh, okay.' Not sure why Kevin would need it, but whatever. Then the exam proceeded.

He told me that during his career, he had seen quite a shift in the population of airline pilots. Back in the day, they were all war veterans who smoked and were kind of a rougher class of folks. These days, it had been several years since he'd met a pilot who smoked, and most of them now have Bachelor's degrees-- if not Master's.

Later in the exam, the doctor told me to make sure Kevin never smoked while we were in the car, and especially never around Penny. At this point, I was pretty confused, and I mentioned that Kevin did not smoke. 'Oh, good!' The doctor was thrilled. Kevin hadn't really seemed like the smoker type.

Apparently, Kevin had seen the info on the walls, and especially the little pin that said, 'Ask me how to quit smoking,' and had taken him up on it.