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Hi. My name is Sonia. And I'm Zoe.
And we are nuclear medicine technologists. At Royal Perth Hospital.
All right. What I'll get you to do is to lie down again for me.
Head on the pillow. Just bring your body towards me a little bit.
I really, really enjoyed maths at school and really,
really wanted to pursue something with that but when
I looked at those careers, they were all things that
involved not that much person-to-person contact.
I wasn't keen on sitting at a computer all day or doing calculations all day.
I really wanted to work with people and this is the ideal job for it.
I could combine my love of maths which I suppose not a lot of people have but,
yeah, my love of maths with this job which, yeah, I
really enjoy and everything else about it as well.
Now, you're having a heart scan. Have you ever had one done before? No.
No? OK. What this test does is it looks at how
your heart's beating, how it's functioning. OK.
Is this arm OK to use for injections?
Yeah, that's fine.
A small sting coming up, Sally.
There we go. That's the worst part done.
So I'm just going to make up what we call 'MAG-3'
which is a renal tracer so it's to image the kidneys.
So for this particular kip we need two gigabecks.
It's saying that we've got 7.57 gigabecks and if I refer
to my little notes, we've got about 5.7 ml in that vial
so from there you've got to calculate the volume you've
got to draw up to get a certain amount of activity.
People automatically think radiation, Chernobyl. By the time
you get to actually working on the job, it's second nature.
It's always in the back of your mind and you can't be
scared of it but you've got to treat it with respect.
After six hours, half of what we've put into you
- the radiation - half of that will be gone
so if you want to eliminate it quickly from your body, the
best thing you can do is have lots of fluids to drink.
So the more you drink, the faster you'll get rid of your radiation. OK.
You just need to relax. Breathe normally.
Nice and still for me. That one's underway.
This is the process data so this has come in straight off the camera.
It's been summed into a whole lot of projections and turned into that 3D picture.
This is the heart in the stressed state. They've
got a little bit of non-activity in that region.
Our decisions, our diagnosis can decide what management they have.
They're a little ... one step closer to a healthier life.
This patient had a knee replacement and now he's
having ongoing pain so we're assessing to see ...
it would be anything like, if he's got infection, if that
would be the source of his pain, if he's got inflammation.
That's his left knee there and you can see it's not bright like the other knee
because there's no bone there because that's where they've replaced the bone.
That area there is what we call quite hot which means there's a lot of counts,
a lot of radiation being emitted from there so that could be
anything like infection or a fracture or something like that.
Time management and organisation is imperative. It's
something you learn the more experience you have.
You get better at knowing, OK I think this is going to take this long.
I'd better move this patient on to this camera and it's definitely something that you
improve with and it's also something that by watching the more experienced technologists,
I find that's a really good way of learning sort of you know organisational tips and
things but it's just something you get used to and it sort of becomes second nature.
One of the hardest parts of our job is probably when you're
doing a scan and you can see the results before your eyes,
even before the doctor's report of the scan. You can see that the prognosis isn't good.
When they ask you, 'Oh, is my scan OK?' or 'Did you see
anything?', we're not allowed to tell them anything
and then if you have one that's quite calm about it, you can
get out of it easily but you do get the ones that won't
leave you alone and that can get a bit awkward but once
again, that's something you get used to with experience.
I have this motto. Patients never remember what you did. Patients never
remember what you say but they'll always remember how you made them feel.
If you make someone feel uncomfortable, that's it. See you later.
They won't come back to us. They'll tell all
their friends that it wasn't a cool experience.
They do come down and feel like someone's actually
listening to them and someone actually cares about
their wellbeing, especially when they tell you or
tell a staff member that you've done a good job.
That's a great feeling.