The Honey Moon is Over

The honeymoon is over, this according to the main instructor. She was joking. But the statement is important because it shows that expectations are higher. She was referring to the natural acceleration of positioning practicals and the corresponding clinical comps, as it should be.

The way it works is you must show that you can do the exam with minimal help from the technologist. You must then show your ability on the same exam no less than one week later. Only then do you fully comp an exam.

This week I got my second comp on CXRs (chest x-rays.) I then flew solo with CXRs.

In positioning classes, we finished up the upper extremities and are into the shoulder girdle. On Monday I have a chapter quiz on the forearm, elbow and humerus. Later that day I'll have a practical on the whole upper extremities. I'm looking forward to it because I can then ask to comp those exams.

We finally dived deep into radio technique. The lecture on Friday began with an IT worker setting up the distance connection. I have to say that the link worked better than I thought. Call me a big baby, but I was initially a little put out that our class would be the distance element as the instructor is an employee of our campus. It's called sharing. The students at the originating end usually are the distance students. That's the way it should be. I signed up to this program because it wasn't a distance link. Okay, peeve relieved.

Yes, the technique portion was very basic. But I found that there were gaping holes in what I knew. No big surprise there, only I found I was having a hard time with mAs and the whole remnant beam thing. I'll see if I can meet with an instructor next week.

Clinical was a blast as always. I liked how the six view spine exam I observed a young tech do really served to cement my understanding. The standing t-spine a-p and lateral reminded me a lot of a CXR. The tech did something else that reinforced my experience. She did all her a-p's and then did all her laterals. That is helpful to the patient because you don't need to move them much between projections as they are already centered to the bucky. I wonder who showed me that concept first?

I also observed several Fluoroscopy exams. Fluoroscopy is a technique for creating "live" X-ray images of a living patient. The Radiologist presses a foot switch to control an X-Ray beam that is transmitted through the patient. What's interesting is that they're often video images displayed on a monitor. Occasionally the radiologist will freeze an image out of the video. I was told by an older tech to watch the exams carefully as I'll be doing them significantly later in the program. I found that watching the action was helpful.