I spent most of yesterday at the VA Hospital having various tests performed and handing over copies of my fingerprints at the police station. I first met with a nice woman from HR who needed me to sign yet another form. She also informed me that I have more paperwork to complete on line. These forms seem to have no end. She then escorted me ...

One difficult aspect of my job in the ER is how to deal with patients who have just lost friends or family in an accident. When we get accident trauma patients, we often find out if there were any fatalities prior to scanning the patient. Either the trauma nurses or the police inform us of this. I recently scanned a woman who was in an accident ...

I was asked to do something last weekend that I didn’t know if I was ready for: work alone. We have a portable CT scanner, primarily for head scans, and thus a designated portable technologist on each shift. Last Friday night, this person was off. My lead tech asked me to have all the patients who would receive a portable head scan transported to ...

I continue to struggle to learn how to do the more difficult exams like CTA head, CTA neck and CTA upper/lower extremities. Performing these exams isn't the tough part ,as many of you know; it's doing the recons and postprocessing. We are often too busy to slow down for someone to assist me, or I'm too mentally exhausted to make an attempt. Not ...

Recently the number of infants and children I’m scanning seems to be increasing. This population presents many challenges for me and my co-workers. How do you get an infant to stop crying and hold still long enough to get a diagnostic study? How do you deal with the scared parent(s)? Also, is a CT scan really the best option for a child due to the ...

With any job there are always tasks that are not performed often and that are not very enjoyable. I encountered one such task recently, administering rectal contrast. It is used instead of oral contrast when a patient can’t tolerate drinking it or when the doctor suspects a particular diagnosis. The patient I was working with had a fistula and ...