Day 3 at Renown!

I've been doing a ton! My ci has barely spent an hour with me but I've been super busy with all of the techs in the echo/vascular lab. Anna and I get to spend quite a bit of our time together in between scanning(lunch breaks and write-ups). My first two days I did all of the patient set up. Bringing back the outpatients and asking about why they are there(symptoms and history), hooking them up to the ecg and taking preliminary images for the tech.

Today was a lot more exciting because I got to do two exams completely by myself. The tech watched and made sure my images and measurements were up to her standards. She kept saying how perfect I was doing and how impressed she was :D

I scanned an in patient with a history of near syncopal episodes. When I scanned her psax@ao I found a large mass in her RVOT. I pointed at it with the tech watching over me, she said "uh huh" but apparently she didn't notice what I was pointing at, she thought I was pointing at "junk" in the pericardium(apparently possibly coagulated fluid from a prior infection). So when we were going over the exam later back in the lab I asked her what she thought it was. And she hadn't even noticed it. She was quite bothered that she missed something that big because we only got it in that one view so we could 100% say that it was a mass. We asked around the lab though and everyone agreed that there was definitely something in the RVOT. We added a note to the cardiologist that a TEE was recommended. I'm interested to follow up on that patient because one of the tech said she had something similar last week in a different patient and it turned out to be cancer.

Later on today, we had a patient that needed a bubble study. She was post-stroke and we needed to rule out a PFO or ASD. The tech was so impressed with my scanning that instead of calling up another tech to help her she had me do the imaging while she pushed the agitated saline. It was amazing and I did a really good job getting images. Plus the pt did not have a PFO or ASD so we were able to rule that out. I finished the rest of the exam while the tech watched and made sure I did everything right.

All in all things have been really exciting and fun. Everyone I work with loves to included me and teach me. I already feel like I'm improving immensely and it is only day 3!