Work experience students, don’t you love them? Every now and then we get them through our department. Generally it’s just for 15 mins on a Friday afternoon when they’ve been with Allied Health all week and are running out of things to see. Technically we’re Medical Services, not Allied Health, but it’s all healthy-type stuff that isn’t doctoring or nursing, I guess. Anyway, I just had one of my flatmates, who is a podiatrist, just bring this week’s student around and asked me to tell her about the joys of Radiography.
So what is something really awesome about Radiography? One of my favourites is x-raying all the drunks who have hurt themselves doing dumb shit. Even if the injury doesn’t end up being that interesting, the patient’s certainly are. A few of the memorable ones I’ve done include the guy who decided that climbing on to the roof to fetch his football while intoxicated was an great idea and fell off and broke both his arms. Or the guy who was taking a nap in the back of his car when his mate decided to take it for a joy ride, crashed into a tree and he broke his femur (he was so drunk that they had to wait 2 days to take him to theatre to put a nail in it). Or the guy who got hit in the face at the pub by a girl, and spent the night in the ED blubbering about it, while his girlfriend (who was seemingly out of his league) fawned all over him.
But the most recent one I’ve had was last Friday night. At 2 am the doctor-on-call rung me up and apologetically asked me if I could come in to do a hand (I was actually still up and playing WoW, but I didn’t tell him that 
) The guy had apparently had gotten into an argument at home and decided to go out on the piss to calm himself down. Clearly it didn’t work too well because he ended up in the ED with a rather swollen looking hand after punching a wall. The whole time I was x-raying him, he was half falling out of his chair, couldn’t keep still and kept saying, ‘I’m sorry I’m so drunk’. It was actually quite adorable and so I just smiled and reassured him that I didn’t mind (secretly I was laughing my arse off, in my head). It turns out, (shown in the images below) that he had dislocated his 4th and 5th metacarpal, which is quite easily fixed – a little bit of local, a good hard tug on it, whack a plaster on and it’s good as new! Despite it not being all too serious, the doctor decided to keep him in over night, just so he could sober up a bit *giggle*.
As you can tell, I take great delight in recalling these stories. The best part is watching the looks on people’s faces when they see some of the x-rays that go with them. As I watched the work experience student cringe every time I brought up a new x-ray, I knew that there was no chance she’d be binge drinking anytime soon!
