Wednesday, 16th August 2023, Part 2
Do they recruit people who are always smiling and cheerful for Radiology, or are they trained to be like that? Do they finish a shift, get home and crack open the Vodka?
Well, either way, they are amazing.
I’ve spent a lot of time with front-line NHS staff over the last five years. Four hospitals, five now including Southampton, heart surgeons, lung people, blood cancer, neurology. In Southampton’s Radiology department there seems to be the highest density of tuned-to-make-you-feel-better people in one department that I’ve come across.
‘Do you like movies?’ Asks the radiographer, Dom. Or the radiographer’s mate, however it works. ‘Have you seen Withnail and I?’
I have as it happens.
‘Do you think Jay should come and see it with me?’
I do as it happens.
Jay is the tall goth-looking, if you can look goth in a white nurse’s uniform, nose-ringed tattoo’d assistant. I assume assistant. Lovely fella.
The technology they operate now is pretty incredible too. I d been told that in Gloucestershire I’d be having eight weeks of Rad Zapping and I thought they were 40 minute sessions. The oncologist is Southampton told me it would be 20 sessions. Nick told me in the briefing he gave that each session lasts for — wait for it — one minute. One minute. Twenty minutes in total is all I need.
Each slice of imagery in the scanner creates a 3-D model of the tumour. Somehow, boffins in the back room, god bless their cotton socks, program the Zapper so that it ‘knows’ the exact shape of the tumour. As it rotates, lead rods move in and out mirroring the shape of the tumour. Where the rods are present no X-rays can get through, where they’re not — the shape of the tumour — they do. These X-rays are 10,000 times more powerful than the one that shows up your broken leg. They dance in and out for a minute, zapping the tumour and nothing else! Wow.
Leave a Reply