It's Been a While... again!

Suffice it to say that it's been a pretty interesting past few weeks for me. My CT time has been a little limited but I have managed to have some interesting experiences.

It all started when one of our machines (we have two Toshiba Acquilion 64 slice) blew it's tube! That made for an interesting night! Especially when the next day, the other machine went down for some odd reason and we had no scanner whatsoever. ER patients were being taken next door to our outpatient facility that has a machine that most of us have never used, myself included! One of our ER doctors in particular was having an absolute fit over the situation and I heard him yelling and complaining about it to anyone who would listen for over two hours! Because it was our fault you know!

Anyway, once the tube was replaced in one scanner and the other was up and running again, I had an interesting experience while doing a chest angio on a woman who was approximately 29 years old. Everything was going fine, she had great IV access and I was having no problems. I did both of my scout pictures and when I FINALLY found her pulmonaries after about 6 sure exposure pictures, my dot for my ROI was nowhere to be found!! I had no idea what to do. I tried everything I could think of. Absolutely everything. I called three different techs, only managing to get ahold of the 3rd one I tried, and found out that I was pretty much on my own and would have to manually watch the contrast in her pulmonaries and start the scan based on my own judgement. My hand were shaking so bad as I did her test injection and then as I started her contrast. Luckily, the patient was young and her body cooperated with me. Her pulmonaries lit up nice and bright, I hit the scan button, and everything was beautiful!! I have never ever had to do that before! It just goes to show me how spoiled that scanner has us all!!

The other interesting experience I had was on this past Friday night. A two year old girl had fallen approximately 5 feet from the top of a slide and was having severe pain any time her parents tried to pick her up. The ER physician had ordered a head and c-spine without and then a chest, abdomen, pelvis with IV only. Of course we're all dreading getting this patient because it's hard enough to just do a head on a child this age, let alone give them contrast and try to get them to hold still long enough for a scan of their entire body! Well the patient was great!! She was of course scared to death, but I had the mom lay on the scanning couch with her for the head and c-spine which seemed to help, and then we spun the patient around so she was feet first in the scanner and could easily see both her parent for the C/A/P scan. The patient's weight was 25 pounds so I hand injected 20mL of contrast and we started the scan. There was a little bit of respiratory motion because of course, a two year old is not going to hold her breath, but other than that we got a great scan! I didn't get to see the report because when we finished it was time for me to go home but I am interested to see if anything was wrong with her.