My second Job Shadow with Mrs. Cindy Smith went splendidly well. Rather than showing me around this time, there was a steady flow of patients. They were the majority of men with prostate cancer and one with lung cancer. The MRIs took anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes each time with each set of scans taking about 5 minutes each. There are two different settings used to identify where the cancer is on the cell, the normal black and white scan, and also a lava scan. These lava scans appear 2D but actually take a 3D picture. When all the images are put together it looks like a video of air bubbles floating around in water because the scan focuses on water and fat. Mrs. Cindy showed me how to look through a scan to find irregular fluids and specific placements of cancer lobes. I also learned that the standard MRIs can have their colors switched from black and white to black and red to detect heat. While I was here there was a patient who had to wait in a waiting room for his radiation treatment to finish, so he couldn’t spread radiation to objects or people outside. While she was explaining the magma scan to me I noticed that he had left the waiting room and once I pointed it out she had to book it outside the computer room to explain why he couldn’t leave, reminding me how dangerous some of this stuff can be. To me, this was a cool experience, but I also witnessed someone who was supposed to be cancer-free have it resurface in several parts of his body so it was hard to keep a bright face with vibes like that around. Despite us knowing we probably saw his cancer resurface we actually that Mrs. Cindy’s job wasn’t to tell the patient so all she could do was send the images to his doctor.
The computer on top shows how far through the scan is and the computer on the right was where I spotted the man had left his room.
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