Just Do It!!

Another one of my rants about the ward cover job that I am doing now. Before I proceed, I do apologise to those who become offended after reading this.

During one of the days, a young girl was admitted to the hospital with severe colitis, possibly a new manifestation of Crohn's disease. She was rather septic and in a lot of pain. The SHO wanted her to have an abdominal x-ray. But as she is too ill to go down to the dept for the x-ray, he decided that she should have a portable x-ray instead.

So it was my job to get the portable x-ray up to the ward. I paged the on-call radiographer about it. I waited for 10 minutues, and there wasn't any reply. I paged the person again, and still no reply. It took about an hour before I received a call back from the radiographer. I explained to her the situation and she said ok.

When she arrived at the ward, she saw that the patient was sitting up on the chair. (the reason the patient was sitting on the chair was because the nurses were changing her bedsheets, and she was just given a shot of morphine). Anyway, she went up to the SHO, who was standing nearby and said, "Is that the girl who needed the portable x-ray?"

The SHO nodded. The radiographer said, "Why do you need a portable one, when she could actually sit on the chair. I am sure she could go to the dept to have it done. A portable x-ray is not optimal and the quality is poor."

The SHO replied, "Yes, I understand the quality of the x-ray will not be great. But she is actually too sick to go to the dept. She might suddenly become unwell on her way there. We are worried that she might have a perforation."

"No, I'm not going to do it. She is sitting up on her chair. She looks well."

My SHO explained to her very nicely again his reasons. The radiographer was not impressed. She kept to her opinions.

Finally, after nearly 15 mins of disagreement, my SHO lost his politeness and became very blunt to the radiographer. "Ok, look, this girl is very ill, and where in your experience as a radiographer, were you trained to judge a patient who is sitting down on a chair, as a stable and well person? You have no medical knowledge to say that."

The radiographer turned red. Yet, she resumed her arguement. "Fine. Is this girl pregnant? I won't do the scan until you can proof to me that she is not pregnant."

"Here, look, her pregnancy test yesterday was negative."

"Fine. I want you to write another x-ray card for me."

"Ok. There."

So, the radiographer reluctantly performed the x-ray. I mean, what is the point of arguing. Just get on with it! Stop being such a pain in the arse!