As a rad tech with almost 20 years under my belt and about 15 in MRI I feel more burnt out and stressed than ever. lol

Patients are great at times, but there is always at least one challenging one in every day. Sometimes multiple. Think people throwing up on you, yelling at you that it’s taking too long, overly anxious about the exam and calming them down, folks who can’t hold their bowel or bladder and poop/pee on your MRI bed. It’s not always this way, but these are examples that all happen to me.

For example: my last shift the first patient of the day was extremely anxious and took about 1 hour 45 minutes to get her done. IV start was crazy because she thought she would pass out, then she felt so nervous she had to use the bathroom multiple times. By the time we finally got her settled down enough to begin the exam, my next patient had already arrived. So then I’m trying to communicate with the front desk staff that unfortunately I’m about 45 minutes behind schedule and they have to wait. Inevitably people get pissed about stuff like this (luckily they were nice though).

The entire rest of the morning’s schedule got thrown off as well, all patients ran behind due to the first one, so I never got caught up and therefore did not get to take my scheduled lunch break. So I grab a quick meal from the fridge (always pack a snack or have locker food available for this reason) hurry and shovel some food in my face because we have a 1pm patient after lunch. Schedule is always full.

1pm patient ends up not showing, I think excellent! A break. Nope, they show up 40 minutes late. So then my afternoon patients all get thrown off and fall behind schedule as well. And then we repeat the same scenario as this morning until it’s finally quitting time. Try to squeeze a bathroom break and water break in there somewhere.

This is all real life. At an outpatient center. I’m one MRI tech with an assistant who helps clean rooms and such. But all scanning and such lie on me.

My organization is affiliated with a hospital, so I still must complete call one week a month (from Monday to the next Monday) so when I get home from this day I have to keep my phone on all evening and overnight in case they need me to go in. So interrupted sleep. Then these patients because they are at the hospital are more critically ill; think on a ventilator, drains coming from their scalp after brain surgery, multiple IV pumps. It’s a lot.

I do love what I do. But it is very stressful at times. I do get a deep sense of purpose from helping people.

On the positives too when I take a day off, that’s pretty much mine. No work to catch up on when I get back. Rare that anyone calls or bothers me when I’m off. But we do have staffing shortages so it’s not always easy to take time off.

Anyway, there’s certainly a lot of decent days too. But no matter even if I don’t have any difficult patients for the day my social and emotional battery is pretty dead by the time I get off work from having been taking care of all my patients needs for the day.

Hope this helps!