Anyone who has ever CT scanned a patient who is allergic to the IV contrast knows how scary it can be. Previously, I only dealt with inpatients so I could confirm with the nurse that the patient had in fact received the allergy prep medications. Now I am working almost exclusively with outpatients. This week I had five patients who were ...

The tough job market continues to affect me. I got hired at the VA as a fee-based CT technologist on a part time basis. I was told that I would work 5 days a week every other week until the two full-time open positions were filled. This was supposed to take me at least into the fall of this year. In an unprecedented turn of events, the usually ...

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 ...

As much fun as I am having working with a student, it is a great responsibility. I am not the primary person training her but we do spend a good deal of quality time together each weekend. She is learning from a wonderful 20 year veteran who continues to teach me new things each and every week as well. When she goes to lunch it is just me and the ...

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 ...

One dilemma I occasionally face is having to scan a patient who has killed someone. We often get motor vehicle accident traumas brought in after a fatality, and the patient we are scanning is the cause of the accident. I had one such case last weekend, where a man was driving drunk with his wife and son in the car. The wife was pretty banged up ...

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 ...