Radiologic Science

The adventure has begun! I moved into the house Rachel and I are subleasing on Monday in Chapel Hill and had orientation on Wednesday. The orientation lasted from 9am to 4pm, with an hour lunch break. We had an introduction to the program, which included:

• introducing ourselves
• getting the professors' contact information
• housekeeping like immunizations and insurance
• parking permits for Duke and Alamance
• the Honor Coe
• behavior and performance
• policies and procedures

Which was interesting, but most of the stuff I had already read or heard. After that, though, Mr. Woodward, the clinical director, did a clinical overview and scared the crap out of me! I know that once I finish this summer and the first two weeks of class in August, I'll be relatively prepared to enter the clinical site and be able to do at least something, but that doesn't stop me from being nervous! He also discussed PDAs and scrubs. They brought up the point that you don't want to have the open-hole crocs, incase a bodily fluid (they said vomit) gets on them. That would be nasty, and I have to admit that I actually hadn't thought about things like that. I was kind of one-minded in that the patient would come to me and I would take the image, and send them back. In my mind, they would be perfectly well-behaved and clean while they were with me, which is definitely not the way the human body works.

After the clinical stuff, we went and got TB test shots, got our School of Medicine ID badges (I'm official now!) and then had some lunch. They are building a cafeteria right behind Bondurant which should be open sometime around the beginning of the Fall Semester - that should be very convenient!!

After lunch we had overviews of the two courses we are taking this summer, which actually turn out to kind of be 3-ish courses wrapped into 2. The first is Human Gross Anatomy, which will be divided into 3 sections taught by 3 professors. The good news is that I actually don't have to work on cadavers! I had been worried about that. Instead, while we are in class, someone will have been prosecting the cadavers so when we get into the lab, we don't have to spend time doing it ourselves and can just look and observe exactly what we need to be seeing. Lucky me!

The second/third course is Introduction to Radiologic Science (which also includes Radiological Health and Imagining Physics). We will be learning about Patient Assessment, Isolation and Infection Control, Medications and Contrast Materials, Catheters, Tubes, Lines and Patient Care Accessories, Body Mechanics, Positioning Principles, Communication, Medical Ethics, and Legalities, Imaging Principles, and Radiation Protection. On top of that course that is split between two different professors and 3 different broad topics, Medical Terminology is a sort of side-course that we must do completely outside of class. We have a textbook for it and every few days there is a quiz on the new med terms.

Finally, after those intros, we had an orientation checklist of paperwork and tutorials we had to complete. This included: contact information, healthcare disclaimer form, immunization records, confidentiality statements, Honor Code, Glutaraldehyde test, Radiation Safety packet, pregnancy student disclaimer, health insurance, formaldehyde test, radiation protection worker registration form (to get our dosimeters), environmental health and safety test (4 of them), and HIPAA training. After we finished we were free to leave and go buy our textbooks!

So after the all-day orientation, I went home and read for seven hours. Then went to bed :) Thursday was the first day of class and I have to say it went quite well. So far it hasn't seemed to be extremely hard but I know that will change and the information load will get bigger. But for now I am grateful it seems doable. On top of getting the program started, my phone decided to become stubborn and pretty much paralyzed. It froze almost everytime I tried to use it, so I had to go to the Verizon store Thursday after class to get it fixed. Luckily it IS fixed, for now. We'll see..