dianarchy.net

back to school, to prove to dad that i’m not a fool

I’ve always been more than a little disappointed in myself for not finishing school at Creighton. I know that logically, I could not have finished in the state I was in, but I should have gone back when I was “better”.

At work, we’re going to be getting a PET/CT scanner. This is very exciting news. It will provide better exams for our patients, and their oncologists won’t have to send them to Boston to get them done.

In every state I’ve ever heard of, nuclear medicine technologists are allowed to run the CT portion of the exam, they just can’t run a regular CT scanner unless they are dual-licensed (meaning in Nuclear Medicine and in Radiography). Unfortunately, Maine has not decided this to be the case, and requires a licensed Radiographer to push the Little Red Button. I would be allowed to inject, set up the patient, do everything except push that magic Little Red Button.

Two of our technologists are dual-licensed. Two of us are not. We are trying to figure out if the two who are licensed in radiography would have to take the specialty CT exam offered before they could do it. We’re also trying to figure out if the two of us who are not would be able to take the specialty exam. The trick there is that you have to do a certain number [pdf warning] of exams in CT before you can take the test. Would our hospital even let us do that (supervised by licensed techs, of course), since we don’t have a radiographer license? I don’t know. Neither does anyone else. It might end up being that in order to do PET/CT, I’ll have to go through radiography school. I’m not necessarily opposed to that idea, but I’d like to know soon, so I can start planning for it.

I’d like to go back to school and get my bachelor’s degree. I got a card in the mail about a school in Florida that I could get a Bachelor of Science in Radiologic Sciences, online. It’s not anything I could use to help the problem at hand, and until I know what the hospital wants to do with me and my inadequate education, I can’t start this. If I did, it would be my luck that they’d require me to go to school for radiography and I’d be doing two schools and working. That would … suck.