Jaded about the field of radiography. Need insight or words of wisdom. I feel like I have made a mistake going into this field…
I am a student just getting done my 2nd semester of rad tech school. I feel like I don’t like anything about the field nor the day to day work of being an X-ray tech. I hate the boringness of just sitting around most of the day. Then when we do have an X-ray, I hate actually doing it. I hate having to move the patient around and set them up and have to think of the different angles and positioning when they cannot do what you want them to. I hate it and it feels monotonous.
I chose to go to rad tech school without shadowing (thanks Covid) and doing some minimal research after being lost about what I wanted to do after graduating college and working some menial jobs in insurance and medical billing for a few years. I wanted to get out of an office job and work with patients hands on. I thought I would like utilizing the technology and critical thinking of knowing the anatomy and being able to position to get the perfect picture and greatly help out the medical team by helping radiologist come to a diagnosis. But I am finding more and more that it doesn’t even matter if you are perfectly set up, it is different patient by patient and nothing is the way that Merrill’s teaches it. Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to things, 1 patient set up will look great to the eye but picture will come out with something wrong. A tech will tell me to do something 1 time and it will look ok but then the next time it won’t work. I just hate this as well. I am a perfectionist and struggle with things not being exactly how I want it, whether it be the picture itself or the patient positioning.
My supportive bf says that maybe there is a setting that I WILL enjoy or a modality that I would like better. I don’t know much about the other modalities but I feel like MRI and CT are similar in the sense that you are sitting there most of the time doing nothing. I’ve thought about IR but don’t want to be on call.
I’m already about half way through so it would feel silly to quit now but I want to quit everyday. It doesn’t help that my clinical site is not the best environment- techs and our clinical instructors not liking students and being toxic towards each other, not really facilitating a great environment to learn and make mistakes. But I have not been happy for a while now while doing this. Not to mention that the classes are really easy to me which makes me feel like my potential is not being fully utilized here.
I do not mean to sound like I am hating on the wonderful people that do this profession. It just may not be for me.
Anyone else experience this and can share their thoughts?
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/Radiology/comments/udh8to/jaded_about_radiography/
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