A day in healthcare without a sonographer,
Would be one less mother and unborn who get to bond in the room in an unspeakably beautiful way and one less family that gets a confirmed diagnosis that they have suffered a late term fetal demise.
One less scrotum hanging around would have warm (or cold if you’re fresh) gel rubbed on it to confirm if they’re torsed and can be saved and one less hopeful mother who would have her ovaries confirmed viable for aspiration of a dominant follicle to use for IVF.
One less black toe would be insonated for the smallest amount of trickle flow by a double gloved provider and one less segmental pressure exam will be done to quantitatively represent the focal aspect of occlusion.
One less hand would be lost in the neck folds of the STAT ICU airborne precaution patient who can’t stay awake resulting in reverb artifact on the dop and one less pre-op carotid will reveal a hemodynamically significant stenosis that correlates to the patients acute stroke signs and symptoms..
One less gallstone that is again noted in patients gallbladder for the 17,oooth time between their CT’s, MRI’s, and Ultrasound history, and one less incidental finding of a well circumscribed, complex lesion with solid-heterogeneous and vascular components located anterio-medial to the porta hepatis that needs to be scheduled for a biopsy ASAP will be characterized and documented in the patients’ medical record that will very well be the key to their diagnosis.
One less breast will have to basically get molested in order to get the most optimal diagnostic images to represent its location and characteristics, and someone’s daughter, sister, mother, aunt, friend, co-worker, and neighbor will continue to wait before their sonographer finds something suspicious that will start them down the path that will eventually lead them into a conversation with a physician that will tell them they have breast cancer.
But, a whole heap more people will get exposed to radiation and even more will be deprived the unique joys of having a sonographer be a part of not only their healthcare team, but their day!
Sonographers are not only highly skilled, compassionate, and intelligent type A critically thinking crays, but also have impeccable sarcastic comebacks for chronic one liners like “is it a boy or a girl” and “can you tell me what you saw?”
They can easily adapt to radiologists, physicians, nurse pracs and PA’s, throwing both sensical and nonsensical workloads in their direction… simultaneously, all while walking around with a widely obscene amount of information in their brains, a bum shoulder, a heart that beats ul-tra-sound, ul-tra-sound!
Oh, and did I mention that Sonographers also have boss level RBF’s when someone asks for results, they find pathology, or someone in scheduling decides to add on a patient onto their workload they just cleared, 10 minutes before they leave?
What’s a day like on the frontlines without a sonographer?
Only a sonographer would truly understand the destruction of the world without them lol, but real talk, the healthcare industry would be severely impacted if DMS’s didn’t handle show up to handle their business.
So while we are thrilled to be a part of the healthcare team and community and take pride in our work, do us a favor folks, both civilian and peers alike… don’t call us techs because a tech can’t do what a sonographer can and y’all wouldn’t make it one day without a good old highly skilled, passionate, and badass diagnostic medical sonographer… IJS.
Humorously, but Seriously, Composed for Bedside Context and Sanity Retention
~Anonymous