Spring Break! Everyone's on Vacation.

These past few weeks have been kind of crazy at our imaging center. We have been short staffed due to spring break vacations. It have given me more of an opportunity to step in and hold my own at the CT scanner.  We have been really busy with patients and remembering the new protocols that the doctors have decided to implement. We had an add-on patient this week who fell and hit her head in the parking lot at her doctor's office and then, was sent over to us for a head CT. When she arrived, she was a older lady in her seventies and sitting in a wheelchair. As our nurses spoke with her to get her initial information she became slightly confused. At this point , we began to bring her into the scanner room and she drifted off to sleep sitting up. We contacted one of our doctors immediately and he instructed us to get her scanned as quickly as possible.  As her images came up on the scanner, she had a large hematoma on the right side of her head. We immediately called 911 and had her transferred to the hospital where she underwent surgery that evening. 

I definately think I am becoming better at recognizing abnormalities on scans.  I know this comes with more experience. I like the fast pace of CT, but sometimes it makes it a hard learning environment. If we have patients scheduled every fifteen minutes, it doesn't leave much room for error! 

Great Day in CT

Today was an awesome day! I was able to scan my first sternum! My patient was in a motorcycle accident three weeks prior where he hit his chest on the handlebars. He complained of sternum pain . Once we saw the images and I did the coronal and sagittal reformats, it was an clear fracture completely through mid sternum. I love doing reformatts on bone work. I think the images are beautiful. I am recently learning to work on the 3D workstation that is mainly used for CTA's etc. I was able to send the sternum to the workstation and do 3D reformats in color that really looked awesome. The CT techs are teaching me to "grow in " a particular area of interest on the 3D workstation. This is where you start with a blank screen on one side, and your area of interest on another screen as an axial image. You hold the mouse down on the area of interest and it appears as a 3D image where the blank screen is. I am  very new at this, but it is another exciting area of CT that I enjoy learning. 

PE Week

This week has been interesting because we discovered two PE's, one on a regular chest protocol. One patient was leaving in a few days to fly out on vacation. He is a routine cancer patient at our facility.At his doctor appointment, he told his doctor he had some increased sob. He came in for a routine chest CT and when we scanned him, he had a huge PE mid right lung! We held him in our waiting room while our doctor looked at the images and he called his doctor immediately. Although it was bad news for the patient, it felt good to catch something so critical before he flew out on his upcoming flight. 

Our second PE was a man in his mid thirities that was recovering from back surgery.  He came in for an DVT ultrasound which was positive. He was then directed to us in CT for a scan of his chest. He also had a PE! He was also immediately taken to the hospital .

It has been a great week for learning !

Spring Semester

I work in a Imaging Center in Lafayette, Indiana. We do not get any trauma. The first few weeks of Spring semester have been pretty routine concerning scans. However, I have scanned a few PE Chests and a few Hi-Res Chests. It has been great scanning something different. We do a lot of Radiation Treatment Planning Scans for our Cancer Center on campus and I think I am getting the hang of it. These patients have ususally recently been diagnosed with cancer and are pretty devastated. Its hard to draw a line between being compassionate about their recent diagnosis, and yet remain professional. I am saddened by what they are going through. I can only begin to imagine what they are feeling. My focus this semester is to work on getting competencies towards taking my CT boards . I need practice on orbits, iac's and facial bones. We don't get a lot of these. We do alot of biopsy work here. I need more practice with this as well. I look forward to having a great Semester.

Unusual Case

Today I saw an unusual case, or at least unusual to me. We scanned an abdomen pelvis on a twenty two year old female . Her diagnosis was frequent UTI's. She had no prior studies done. This was her first CT. When we saw the images come up, both of her kidneys looked awful! She had tons of cysts all over both of her kidneys. You could hardly see the kidneys themselves because of all of the cysts. Most of the cysts were substantial in size. I have heard of polycystic kidney disease and wondered if this was such a case. We also noticed her liver had numerous small dense areas as well. It almost looked like the cysts were spreading to the liver. Our radiologist looked at the images and suspected more than just kidney cysts. This was a good case for me to see, although I was sad for the patient. This semester has been a great learning experience for me. I look forward to next semester, but I am ready for Christmas Break!!

Scanner Down!!

This past week was interesting. Less than half way through Wednesday, our CT scanner just quit working! Everything just froze!! What a helpless feeling when you have a whole day ahead of you with patients every fifteen to twenty minutes!
As it turned out, we had to call Keith , our CT repair man. He showed up quickly, but had to order and replace a part in the scanner. So, we had to cancel the rest of the days schedule, and add all of those patients on for the next day. Sounds pretty simple, but our next day was already booked! Boy, was Thursday a busy day! We knew Wednesday night that we had better get a good nights sleep because Thursday would be non stop! To my surprise, it went remarkably well considering the circumstances. We had no biopsies scheduled , so that helped reduce the stress some. We worked efficiently and our teamwork payed off, and I got to scan quite a bit as well.

Bone Work

I have been enjoying bone work in CT lately. I think the detail in the bone work is awesome. We have had a few challenges recently with elbows! For some reason, patients that need elbows scanned lately have been rather large patients. This can pose a challege in the CT scanner, especially if they have limited range of movement with the elbow. I am learning how important improvising is in these cases. Can the patient keep the elbow straight down by their side in the AP position? If not, can they go head first in the scanner in the "superman" pose with affected elbow stretched out above their head? Can you get the elbow in the SFOV? ( Especially without them falling off the couch!) That is the ultimate challenge with certain patients. It is great to learn little tricks and tid bits of knowledge from seasoned techs! I still have so much to learn! I can't believe we only have a few weeks left in this semester.