A Long Weekend
July 3rd, 2007 by PotatoWow, was that a long weekend. Scans every day, finishing off with 14 consecutive hours in the MRI suite on holiday monday. Imagine the overtime I’d get if I was actually employed!
It was getting pretty rough there, with no breaks to go eat, so I had a cooler bag with lunch and dinner. I had a cancellation right around lunch, which was kind of good in a way, since I was starting to fall behind in my schedule, and it gave me about a half hour to run to Timmy’s to stock up on donuts and get some more ice for the cooler bag. I got home last night just absolutely exhausted, and did not sleep at all well. Now I’m getting ready to go back for more scans tonight. It never stops!
About halfway into the afternoon, an orderly came by and dropped a patient (as in, an actual sick person in a wheelchair) at the door of the MRI, and ran off even though I was yelling at him (I couldn’t leave the console for another 10 minutes or so). Finally I get a chance to go up to this poor woman and ask her what she’s here for, and if I can help her (hoping that she’s not going to say “I’m here for an MRI”). She’s here for “a scan”. I ask if she knows what kind of scan, if its an emergency case, and if she knew whether they paged someone to come in and take care of her because I’m not a doctor… she says the only thing she knows is she has to get an injection. Well that, at least, tells me that nobody’s expecting me to give her an emergency MRI. I start searching the mostly lights-out nuclear medicine department for someone that might know what to do. Finally, hidden way in back around the corner in one of the treatment rooms I find one of the nuc med techs, who had been called in to help this woman and knew exactly what to do (and was also confused as to why she was dropped off at the MRI).
So, crisis averted, it was back to scanning for me. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. We have two machines networked together to run the MRI. Basically, one is supposed to be running the scans, and the images are instantly sent to the other one for backing up to CD-R and viewing. Unfortunately, the hard drive on the other one filled up sometime on Friday, and noone who knew how to properly back it up and clear it off came in, which meant a lot of intense multitasking for me to make sure I got all my stuff backed up without having to spend an extra 7 hours at the end of the day to get it done. I was worried the same would happen to the main console itself, as it topped 90% yesterday…
So, a long weekend.