Weeeowwwm! Shkkkktt!

I spent the morning with a sonographer today.  She was doing echocardiograms, which is where you use ultrasound to take pictures of the heart and make all sorts of measurements to make a report so that a much more highly paid cardiologist can glance at it later on in order to completely agree with it.  It was good fun.

Normally I can't read ultrasound scans for sh!t.  On Monday I was sitting in with a gynaecologist and one of the patients brought in some scans of her uterus in case he wanted to see them. For some reason he wasn't interested so I grabbed them.  I held them up to the light and decided to pop them right back into that big ol' envelope they came in.  Absolutely incomprehensible.

I understand the u/s (that's "ultrasound" for you non-medical types - feel the power!) scans that are in textbooks because they have labels and arrows all over the pictures.  In fact, if you removed the pictures I'd probably understand them even better.  But real scans don't have this stuff.  They have a few labels, but the labels say things like "A-A" and "B-B" which makes me think that perhaps they are origami instructions rather than u/s scans.  "Look mum, I made a uterus!"  "Oh honey, I'm so proud of you!" *hugs*

But the great thing about today was that we were looking at the heart and I was right there looking at the screen of the machine rather than puzzling over pictures in a book.  I was able to devise a fiendishly clever technique for analysing the scans: if things moved, they were "heart"; if they didn't move, they weren't.  It was also made heaps easier by the lovely sonographer doing the scans who was happy to talk me through every step of what she was doing for every patient who came in, while simultaneously answering my ignorant questions that I was firing at her.  She is my new hero, the wind beneath my wings.

At the end, she even let me have a go at doing it.  I got to hold the transducer-thing and fiddle around getting different views of a very patient patient's heart.  The patient and the sonographer both looked a bit alarmed when I started making lightsaber noises, but I defy anybody to not do that.  It's a handle that shoots out a magic beam, for crying out loud!

But the best thing about the day was that I learned a bit more about how to learn stuff.  After one patient I felt stupid.  After two I felt puzzled - in medicine aren't you supposed to see one, do one, teach one?  Why didn't I get this yet?  After three I felt educated - this was starting to make sense.  After four I felt bored and wanted to leave, but stayed because I couldn't think of a diplomatic way of walking out.  After five I felt equivocal - perhaps there's more to this than I thought.  And after the sixth and last, I felt reinvigorated - there's a lot of stuff I don't know yet but now at least I knew more than I did when I woke up this morning.  And today is the first day I've felt like that for a while.