Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Customs and Immigration and Radiation

When disembarking the new Carnival Splendor yesterday, we had a very interesting experience. When we were giving in our customs declaration, another agent came over and asked us to step to the side.

As we had purchased nothing during this little 2 night cruise, I thought it was because I had "zero" on the form for purchases and they were checking this out. But that was not it.

The agent asked me if I recently had anything involving radiation? I mentioned that I had taken my Dad to the Dr. the other day and he had some x-rays and one of them was nuclear but not me. He showed me a little gadget on his belt that was glowing red. This gadget was actually a radiation detector and it was going off big time!

Well it actually turned out to be Helen who had a neclear stress test 5 days earlier and the stuff they inject for this test is radioactive which was still in her system and sending radiation signals out.

The man explained, and we are sharing it here, that anytime someone has anything done that involves radiation they should carry something to that effect - the paperwork from the testing lab is sufficient. He never did say how long that stuff stays in one's system. He went on to explain that without this someone could be "inconvienenced - his word" when coming back into the country especially for land border crossing, from a longer cruise or coming from many other countries (we only went to Nassau) or if security levels were higher. He was fine once he knew why his detector went off and we were on our way but it sure was an interesting experience and valuable information to pass along.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello,

I am Al's friend Bob from Massachusetts. It is 14 degrees and as I am making the coffee. I am looking out the window at 11 inches of snow. I will be shoveling it soon. I keeping thinking about how I would rather be waking up, receiving room service and drinking my coffee from my balcony over lookiing the beautiful Caribbean. Time to bundle up and get the shovel going