Overwhelmed in CT

I think I am on information overload! I am unable to be in CT all of the time. I usually get two days per week in CT while the other three are spent in x-ray. I learn best by repetition and sometimes going back and forth between modalities does not help in this area. I have taken great notes and use them as references a lot. Learning protocols and reading scripts to make sure the patients symptoms and diagnosis meet the scan that has been ordered, is constant confusion! I work with two CT techs that have done CT for many years. They are great at what they do, but sometimes I feel that no matter how much I have learned, it is never enough for them. They can scan really fast, and I know I slow them down when I am scanning. Somedays I walk out of there pretty discouraged.

Last week, I got a real eye opener! We do radiation treatment planning with the oncology department . We had a breast cancer patient that was middle age that had recently been diagnosed, and was getting ready to start treatments. As we scanned, we were shocked at what we saw. This patient's breast cancer was so invasive, it had ate through her sternum. Her skin on the lateral side of her armpit down her ribcage was red, inflamed and oozing. The smell was horrid! We were stunned and confused as to why she waited so long to go to the doctor. She had to know something was wrong many months ago or longer! Obviously this patient had been in denial for quite some time. They are unable to do surgery at this point, because it has become so invasive. Their hope is to shrink it, but her prognosis is grim.. The oncology team said it was one of the worst cases they had seen in years.

Update of CT Progress

The past few weeks have been very informative in my CT training. As I said before, we are an outpatient facility so we don't see much trauma. The past few weeks we have had more bone work than ususal. I am amazed at the detail of bone that CT shows. I have been able to scan a few feet, two wrists, a few spines, and an elbow. Sometime it is a challenge getting the patient in the correct position for the scan due to their injuries. The elbow was interesting since the patient had just came from ortho and had his elbow in a soft cast stabilized in a bent position. We finally placed him head first in a "swimmers position" to enable the elbow close the center of the scanner. We got great images. I have been able to scan a few lumbar spine myelogram patients and one disc-o-gram. With the disc-o-gram, I have been learning how to angle the scanner parallel to the plane of the discs of interest. We also scanned a cancer patient's humerus for bone mets. I am still learning to do coronal and sagittal reformats on bone work. Sometimes it is confusing, because of different doctors requesting different reformats. I believe constant repetition is the key to learning and becoming more efficient in the field of CT.