First Man Out

This was an interesting week, to say the least. Already on my agenda was an image analysis set for Tuesday (which I prepared so diligently) and a midterm in my positioning class set for Wednesday. My home life has been jostled around a bit, since my wife had some much needed surgery, so her mother moved in to help. For the meanwhile, my wife is disabled, so that means that I have two women to take care of! The great part is that Mom has mad cooking skills and that I always have food waiting for me! The downside is that there is an endless stream of pots and pans to wash :( C'est la vie.

I showed up for my hospital shift on Tuesday, image analysis all set and ready to go. While walking in to the hospital with my co-student, we had an interesting chat about how he wasn't sure that he was going to be able to continue with the program, since the commute was killing him. If he was looking for sympathy, he was talking to the wrong guy- my commute is just as long, but on an even worse series of freeways. Then the conversation switched to the lousy job market and how hard it was going to be to find an entry-level X-ray tech position. I told him that in two years, the whole thing could be turned around and that if you're good, you'll be able to land a position. I had heard through the grapevine that he was considering dropping the program, so this conversation wasn't really a surprise to me.

After getting settled down for my shift, I tried to hunt down my image analysis X-ray from the file room, but the patient file had gone AWOL. I asked the most knowledgeable office person I knew to help me, and still we came up with squat. Great...now I had to come up with plan B. My original analysis was going to be on a hand, so I figured that I could just find another hand X-ray and I could use my narrative analysis for the proxie X-ray. Well, later on in the day, when my clinical coordinator showed up for the analysis, that was a no-go and she was not very happy about it- in fact, I had actually caused her to waste a trip out to the hospital. Now I get to do two analyses on my next due date!

But earlier in the day, my co-student (who was already uncertain about his future) decided to quit the program right there on the spot. He performed a bad chest X-ray exam (already double-exposing the same film cassette and was on his way to making another exposure) and got royally landed on by the "supervising" technologist. Yeah, after doing the same routine X-ray for five weeks, you would think that the guy would know what he was doing by now, but nope. After getting reprimanded, it only took about five minutes before he came back and said that he was leaving. And sure enough, he did. He walked right over to our clinical instructor and handed in his hospital badge. He stopped by the X-ray suite to say "good luck" to everyone, then walked. Well, without clinical hours, your classroom hours don't mean shit, so it was indeed the end for that poor chap. But from what I saw from him over the past five weeks in the hospital, he wasn't cut out for that kind of work anyway, and I'm pretty doubtful that he would've made it anyway.

Everything happens for a reason, or so they say.