A Radio What?
Hello!
I am a Radiographer. A Diagnostic Radiographer to be exact. I work for the NHS and play a vital role during a patients journey when something goes wrong. But a there are a lot of people out there who have no idea what a “radiographer” is, or does. So, I’m hoping to shed a little light on the subject. Expect spelling errors, grammar errors, and the occasional complete nonsense.
My job involves shooting X-radiation (AKA X-rays) at people to take pictures of their insides. That’s a very brief and simplified way of describing it obviously, but it’s what I do.
Some days I am working in A&E X-ray, where patients can vary from having a bit of a cough, to a collapsed lung, or a sore knee, to a chainsaw stuck in their leg. You literally never know what’s going to come through the door.
Some days I work in Outpatients X-ray, where patients who have broken bones, or had major heart or lung surgery, or are recovering from illnesses such as pneumonia come and have check-up X-rays to make sure everything is still OK.
Some days I go up to Theater where it’s my job to use X-rays to produce pictures so the surgeons can hammer nails down the entire length of a bone, or screw plates onto bones to put them back together, or find kidney stones to blast them with a laser. Sometimes we’re used to help surgeons find foreign bodies that may have been stood on, swallowed, inserted, or “fallen on”.
Some days I go into Fluoroscopy where we do numerous things with Barium and other substances called Contrast, such as making patients swallow it so we can look for leaks in their oesophagus, or swallowing it the wrong way. Sometimes we put Contrast up the other way, again to check for leaks in their bowel after having a stoma bag, or diseases such as Diverticulitis.
Other days I’ll go into CT, which can again range from somebody having a scan to check their cancer is still gone, to checking to see how badly the cancer has spread. We scan badly fractured bones and make 3D reconstructions so the surgeons know what to expect when they open the patients up, and can plan how to fix them. We do scans on people who have had devastating strokes and brain haemorrhages. We can scan people who have been in bad accidents, or have been attacked to see what the internal damage is. We can even scan people to look for blood clots.
Then there are days where I’ll go to Endoscopy, where we use our X-ray equipment to help the doctor correctly guide their scope all the way from the patients mouth, into their stomach, and then into the gall bladder, and blast gall stones with a laser, or even grab hold of them and pull them out (yes, they pull them all the way from the gall bladder and out of the patients mouth).
All this is what a newly qualified Band 5 radiographer does — there’s even more to get stuck into when you specialise or move up to Band 6, 7, or even 8. Every day is different.
As I hope you can see from that list above radiographers do an awful lot and, chances are, if you have to come into hospital you’re probably going to come into contact with one of us. Radiography means we can produce pictures of the inside of a patients body without causing (or at least, causing very little) pain and discomfort. If we weren’t here doing our jobs the doctors, nurses, surgeons, and many other specialists would be screwed. Without us they’d have to get their answers through very invasive surgery or trial and error with treatments. To me, that’s insanely cool.
But when I get asked what I do for a living I’m 9 times out of 10 met with a blank and confused face followed by “so… you work in radio?”. We get called nurses (or Doctors if you’re male — that’s another topic all together!). It’s not a bad thing to be a nurse, obviously, nurses do a fantastic job and the NHS would fall over without them, but it took 3 years of stress and tears to be able to do what I do now. Very few people realise that we train for a minimum of 3 years to do this job, just like a nurse or physiotherapist (and many more disciplines).
So the point of me starting a Medium page is to try and raise a bit of awareness for my fellow radiographers and what we do. It’s for me to empty my brain onto a page, relieve some stress, and check in on my Mental Health. Hopefully, if anyone reads my ramblings, you’ll learn a bit about radiography and what it’s like to work in the NHS.
