Week two- our first FULL weeks – 5 days- of work. The dreams of calculating the wrong techniques, having 7 repeats on an infant, x-raying the wrong patient and not even realizing it, and being ripped to shreds in our first review are starting to subside. I’m starting to feel like I can handle this. I’m starting to take pride in how much I’m learning. It’s a good feeling to take an image your’re really proud of!
Being on “Level 2” – where general x-rays are taken – has given us a good introduction to both Flinders and the work. We see in-patients – the patients in beds or wheelchairs that require routine images, or follow-up images, as well as out-patients that just need follow-up xrays of their broken arms, legs, toes, etc. We aren’t faced with patients first presenting with their bones poking through their skin and swollen like shiny pomegranates. That comes later, on “Level 3”.
The most striking thing that we’ve been introduced to on Level 2, however, is the prevalence of “Bugs”. Not the common cold, or a bit of rhinitis, but the scary ones: MRSA, VRE, and even a touch on Dengue Fever! You take for granted that you’ll be dealing with these things at some point in your career at a hospital, but in Australia these things seem to be a bit more prevalent. We get patients with these bugs on a daily basis. Multiple times. We down colored gowns and glove up. We cover our films and practice our “clean & dirty” tech routine that we were taught at school. We are careful about where we touch and who moves what, and disinfect everything with “tuffies” once they are gone. Sounds standard, of course, but in school they didn’t prepare us for how often we will be gowning and de-gowning, and how often we will be seeing these patients.
As we make our nightly trek up to Michael’s office on level 3, we get our preview of what’s yet to come for us in the ED (or ER as we call it back home): Man with Dengue Fever, a nurse bustling in to the room to let the techs know that the next patient has everything you can imagine – kindly rattling off a few to make her point: “MRSA, VRE, SARS, Scabies, Malaria- probably even Ebola”.
Ok, so Ebola might be a stretch, but we must joke about it in order to cope with the fact that we are constantly surrounded by these sometimes petrifying diseases. Michael explained to us that because of the climate here, and because of the migration of folks from the Middle East and Africa, there are a lot more cases of tropical diseases (like the Dengue Fever I mentioned) and others that are rare in the states. Hell, they even have the Hendra Virus here! (Horse Flu for those of you in the States)
With each new week, I’m sure we will continue to encounter new patients with interesting health histories, and learn about brand new diseases that we’ve heard of but never really known much about. It comes with the territory, I suppose. Something to bring back to the states with us J
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