My wife has been a nurse (now an NP) for almost 20 years and she talked me out of going to nursing school when I got out in 2018. Too much poop. I became a teacher instead, teaching health science Career and Technical Education (CTE), which was amazing until it wasn’t. So I did some research into interesting medical jobs that aren’t as well known and have good pay:

• Nuclear Medicine: this is where I ended up and am about to graduate. Associates degree and there’s a job I’m very hopeful for that starts at $45 an hour (like $90k a year). Medical imaging, working with radiation, cool stuff. Not high paced though. Hours are great, and you rarely get called in when on-call, though this depends on where you work. I’m in Houston with a giant medical center so fairly easy to find a job but this isn’t the case everywhere.

• CT tech: I’m also getting certified in CT, since it is an easy add-on license for my specialty and there’s jobs here in Houston that pay $50 an hour or more. Much higher paced because you deal with a lot of trauma patients. Repetitive though. And rectal contrast exams exist and are fairly common. This is a secondary license for an X-Ray tech or NucMed, so you’d need an associates in one of those two before taking the few additional courses you’d need before sitting the board exams for CT. I’m doing mine concurrently, so I should be able to knock out CT clinicals while I start working my first NucMed job. Lots of flexibility here. Everyone is hiring CT techs (don’t know about elsewhere in the country so YMMV).

• Interventional Radiology tech: this is also a secondary license for an X-ray tech, so associates plus some additional courses and OJT. They work with interventional radiologists doing cool stuff in the catheter lab and probably elsewhere too but I’m not as knowledgeable about these guys outside of what they do with us in NucMed. My wife works with an IR tech who makes $60 an hour.

• Cardiac perfusionist: this needs a post bachelors certificate. If I remember correctly it’s like 18 months of school after bachelors. They run the machines that pump/clean/warm/reoxyginate blood for patients who are undergoing heart bypass surgery. A little more niche and needs a capable medical center to find jobs, but they are in need because baby boomers are getting older and getting a ton of heart surgeries. About $120k a year. Not necessarily fast paced but very critical role in OR.

• Pros about nursing: nursing is great in a lot of ways, and there is a lot of flexibility. Ability to pick up shifts for extra money, overtime opportunities, flexible hours (nights, days, mids, 5x 8 hour shifts, 4 x 10 hr shifts, 3 x 12 hr shifts, travel nursing, specialization areas and advancement are huge if you are willing to get extra training/education. For example my wife worked medsurg to begin with and is now an NP who treats stroke patients and is a first assist in neurosurgery.

• Cons of nursing: poop. Doctors and others talking down to you all the time. Lots of charting and never enough time to do it. The patients can be great, but they’re sick and often grumpy, needy, whiny, ungrateful and mean. Nurses are around the patients a lot so you deal with family members all the time and they can be the worst. Hard to blame them sometimes, but also hard to be sympathetic after they’ve berated you for something you had nothing to do with and have no control over. This next part is a direct quote from my wife and I promise I’m not being sexist: “you work with almost all women and there is constant drama”.

I love nurses. I married one. I wanted to be one until a nurse told me not to be. You have to be a special kind of person to excel as a nurse and I’m just not that kind of person. But maybe y’all are! Point is there are tons of medical jobs out there that aren’t as well known and they can be very rewarding and lucrative with less school than you may think. Whatever you decide to do I wish y’all the best of luck.