And a might cheer went up.
Yea!
And I took my first X-rays on actual living breathing people!!
I’m a sophmore in the radiology program at the University of Charleston in West Virginia. My clinical rotation is 2 days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:00 AM until noon. Tuesday was pretty much an orientation where we got a tour of the department and other bits of the hospital. I didn’t get any sleep the night before, so I guess you could say I was just a little nervous. Then during orientation we got a whole bunch of vitally important information, none of which I can remember.
Today I wasn’t as nervous as I was on Tuesday, which was good. We had to watch a video about patients privacy rights for about 40 minutes and then we went out on the floor. Our clinic instructor is really nice, always upbeat and a very good sense of humor. The other techs seem to be nice, but I’ve only been ther for 8 hours, so that will take some more time.
In my positioning class we’ve only learned chest and abdomen, so those are really the only radiographs that we could do.
By do I mean that we could participate in the entire procedure, but not do it by ourselves. Either a certified tech or our instructor has to be there. Which at this early stage is a good thing, 'cause on certain things I still have my head stuck 1/2 in and 1/2 out of my ass.
But as I said above, I got to do my first X-ray on a living breathing human. A man who had a kidney transplant came in to have a followup x-ray done. I only screwed up a few things, none of them overly major, and we didn’t have to take either picture over.
I also helped transport 2 patients from radiology back to their rooms. My grossout moment of the day was the man I helped transport back to his room. He had some blisters/bedsores on his ass and a number of the blisters had popped. Not barf inducing, but a reminder to me that I am going to see some truly nasty stuff while I’m doing this.