Getting a physical in Bangkok: a health check-up that's worth every baht

"So, did you manage to drop the kids off at the pool?" my friend Ruth euphemistically asks as we reach the hotel. I mumble a reply in the negative. It has been a rather harrowing day at the Bumrungrad International Hospital, in Bangkok, having our everythings checked.

Ruth and I, initially not very intimate friends, now know more about the other's inner workings than is perhaps strictly necessary. For example, she was able to produce a stool sample ("drop the kids off") during the examination and I was not. I feel like a failure.

The fear of stool-related failure was exactly the kind of thing that had made me put off seeing a doctor for so many years. When it comes to health there are two types of people: those who think ignorance is bliss and that being told they suffer from some kind of condition will immediately make them pop off to the big waiting room in the sky; and those who run to the doctor as soon as they feel an itch in their throat, clogging up emergency wards with imaginary ailments and ruining other people's chances of surviving the next bubonic plague by incessantly popping antibiotics and thus making viruses immune.

I belong firmly in the former camp. I don't have a doctor and I stay away from anything in a white uniform smelling of disinfectant. I had a "physical" about 15 years ago, when I started paying for life insurance (which seems to mean that people I don't even like will get a large sum of money after I die), and found the experience nasty and humiliating. I hadn't seen a doctor since then.

I told myself it was because I hate officious clipboard-nazis shouting out what's wrong with me across a crowded, freezing waiting room, and the brutal bedside manner of Hong Kong doctors (no eye contact, in and out in five seconds flat, big bag of antibiotics no matter what the ailment is). Also, well, I was never sick. But the truth is I was afraid I'd be told something was wrong. A secret smoker, I wanted to kick the habit before some jumped-up pre-pubescent doctor in oversized glasses had the chance to tell me to do so. Also, if I had to have a chest X-ray, I wanted to clean out my lungs first, so they wouldn't look like the "whatever you do, don't buy this product" organs they put on cigarette packets.

And so the years slid by.

Then, in December 2012, I managed to stop smoking quite effortlessly, and with all that free time on my hands I started doing the things I'd been putting off for years. First stop was the dentist and, as I sat there having a huge syringe jammed through my jaw and into my knees, I realised I hadn't had my teeth checked in seven years. Time flies when one is a secret smoker.