A month or so back – as chilly March gave way to marginally less intemperate April and the end of what may well prove to be my last term of teaching fast approached – I received an email from one of the international students on my course… asking for an extension.
This is by no means unusual; the rapid approach of final exams increases the pressure on individual students, some of whom start to regret not having managed their time more effectively earlier in the term. Desperation starts to creep in.
In this instance, however, the student was definitely unwell – and a simple request for extra time rapidly turned into something rather more extreme as he was admitted to the Royal Jubilee Hospital here in Victoria. A forwarded letter from the doctor there soon revealed that the student had somehow contracted TB and was unable either to sit the final exam or to finish the outstanding coursework.
Now, I had thought that TB was a thing of the past – and that may well be so in many parts of the world. I gather that children in BC are no longer these days inoculated against TB. I certainly was as a youngster back in the late 1960s. There was a BCG program delivered through schools in the UK and I was duly vaccinated when I turned thirteen years of age.
I was a little taken aback, therefore, to receive a few weeks the student’s original request a call from the Royal Jubilee TB clinic. I (and, presumably, others from the student cohort concerned) were requested to attend the TB clinic twice in a three day period – to be checked for infection and to have applied the necessary measures to stamp out any possible outbreak.
Now, I didn’t expect to have been infected – even though my vaccination was a very long time ago. The likelihood of my having been exposed to a dangerous contact was also extremely slim, but I still had to make the trek into the city – to find a place to park (always non-trivial in hospital car parks) – to twiddle my thumbs nervously whilst awaiting my turn for the brief but effective consult… and then to do it all again two days later.
Anyway – the thing that I am sure the gentle reader really cares about…
…I don’t have TB!
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