The irony has not escaped me. After spending the majority of my fertile years avoiding pregnancy because the timing wasn’t right, my husband and I are now (well, we think we are) ready to take the journey to parenthood, and we’ve hit a bump in the road – actually, we’ve hit four of them.   While uterine fibroids affect about 77 percent of ...

I had to go back for a repeat mammogram today. The technologist seemed to be in a better mood, so I decided to tell her what I do for a living. This quickly changed the tone of the exam from good to great. We discussed that the most difficult part of her job and the least difficult of mine is the positioning, and we had a little laugh. She was ...

It’s not every day that I get to be on the other side of the X-ray table or scanner. This week, I went for a mammogram and got to do just that. I was going to tell the technologist what I do for a living but decided not to. She was nice, but she did not make me feel at ease when I entered the room. She didn’t do several things that I try to always ...

Each week, one patient usually stands out for me as truly satisfying to care for. This week, we had a young woman in her mid 20s with terrible abdominal pain. She'd recently had her gall bladder removed and had just given birth a few weeks prior. Upon meeting her, I could tell she was in legitimate pain. She was able to tolerate all the oral ...

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 ...