Jobs are difficult to get these days and it end ups being more about who you know, not what you know. I have my foot in the door at the VA because of a former colleague. She actually helped me get my first CT job right out of school and now she’s helping me out again. I guess I’ve impressed her somewhere along the way. This is an important ...

The more people I talk to about CT the more aware I have become that they do not know the differences between CT and MRI. They often think they are the same modality. I have been trying to educate people about the many ways in which they differ. If any of you watch the show Breaking Bad on AMC you know that the main character, Walt, has ...

Protecting a patient's confidentiality is an important responsibility of healthcare workers. In the news today the UCLA Health System agreed to pay a $865,000 settlement for potential violations of federal privacy laws. Hospital workers repeatedly accessed the electronic medical records of several celebrities over a three year period. ...

Does reality ever measure up with expectations? We see something and want to buy it hoping it will make us happy. We think if I only had that car or that job then I will have truly arrived. The truth is the happiness and growth comes during the pursuit of what we seek, not in attaining it.  When I was in X-ray school, I wanted a job in CT ...

As CT technologists we often wonder if the scan we are performing is really necessary. Do we not fully understand the severity of the illness, have we not taken a thorough history, or are we thinking about the potential unnecessary radiation the patient is about to receive. These are all things that pop into our minds from time to ...

It is a well known fact in the radiology community that the amount of radiation from a CT is much higher than that of a traditional x-ray. Doctors working in emergency rooms order numerous CT scans each day hoping to diagnose, save lives, and avoid law suits. Working in CT in a busy ER there is never a shortage of patients who have orders for ...

Last weekend the veteran technologist I usually work with was away at a conference. I had no idea who I’d be working with and this left me feeling a little uneasy. It turned out that Saturday I worked with a woman I am very familiar with and truly enjoy and Sunday with a woman I rarely encounter. I was very proud of how I handled myself throughout ...

This week I finally had the opportunity to do a brain perfusion CT. One of our senior technologists was available to show me what to do. She is an excellent teacher, so the whole experience wasn’t as bad as I had initially anticipated. The post-processing isn’t too tough; just very tedious and unlike any other post-processing I do. The perfusion ...

While working the weekends affords me a great deal of time off, it unfortunately has a new drawback that I recently became aware of. When new protocols are added like the new brain perfusion scan, an educational in-service was scheduled to review every aspect of this complicated procedure. Of course, it took place during the week only once, and at ...

Each shift, I work with a senior technologist who is in charge of all that takes place. I appreciate the leadership. but often from shift to shift I am told to do things differently. This has made the learning process difficult and slower for me because you can't exactly tell your superior “No, I want to do it this way.” As I'm becoming ...