Profile

My job is very mixed .  I work in a hospital so everything is related to the real world, which I love.  One minute I can be trying to find out why our equipment isn’t working, the next minute I am called to the phone because a patient is worried about their treatment.

Nuclear Medicine is so clever – it’s kind of like a backwards X-ray.  We give people slightly radioactive injections which will look at a part of the body that they are worried about.  They lie under a big camera which can see where the radiation has gone to in their body.  The pictures help us to see what is wrong and how we can help them.  We have different scans for different diseases all over the body and it’s not always injections, sometimes patients have to eat a radioactive cottage pie or drink a milkshake!

I need to make sure the equipment all works properly and that the patients are safe.  We are always looking for ways to reduce the amount of radiation patients receive but still make sure we get good pictures.  Sometimes I will give them advice about how they need to act when they go home while we are waiting for the radiation to leave their bodies.

Drop my little boy at school, get stuck in traffic, dash to work.  Switch on computer and check e- mail. Go down to the camera room and check the results from the daily checks the staff have done.  Get interrupted to go to the phone to a reassure a patient that their cat will be ok after their radioactive treatment.  Go back to camera room to set up a measurement to check they are running safely.

Meet with manufacturers to talk about  buying a new gamma camera (nearly half a million pounds!). Have a cup of tea, chat to colleagues in the staff room.

Find a problem with one of the gamma cameras.  Battle with call centre to send us an engineer ASAP. Work with staff to rearrange bookings, trying not to delay too many patients.

In the afternoon, run a treatment clinic  with Janet – patients coming in to have a special kind of radiation to make their thyroid better.  There’s often tears and laughter….people react in different ways to being a bit frightened!

After tea, have a quick chat with our chief technologist about a new research trial that we will be part of. We need to keep a radioactive plate in the same place whilst the patient is having their scan…..so we start messing about with bulldog clips, chairs, retort sands, wire and tape….are we back at school?!