Michael Milkovich is an X-ray and computed tomography (CT) technologist who has been working at Royal Columbian Hospital for three years. Marelle Reid of The Record caught up with Milkovich this week to find out what it's like in the medical imaging department.
Question: Can you describe your role?
Answer: Basically, we take X-rays of all different types of people, from out-patient walk-ins to major traumas, either in our department or around the hospital. Depending on what kind of X-ray we're doing, it'll be a couple of different views for the doctor to diagnose what's going on.
Q: What's the most difficult part of the body to X-ray?
A: Probably abdominal X-rays, because sometimes patients have difficulty standing up, so you have to kind of work with their limitations.
Q: The easiest?
A: The hand or something like that, if patients are mobile.
Q: What's the most common type of X-ray?
A: I would say chest X-rays. We're looking for different things like fluid in the lungs, collapsed lungs.
Q: What's the age range of patients that you see?
A: It's everybody. We do newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit, right up to, I think the oldest was 102 or 103. It definitely varies.
Q: What's the most interesting thing about your job?
A: You get to meet all different kinds of people at the hospital, especially with RCH being a trauma hospital. You get to meet people walking in, sent from their doctors, or patients that have been in major accidents and need a different type of care.
Q: Most challenging aspect of your job?
A: There are different personalities and all different types of injuries, so their limitations can be different from one person to the next, so balancing those can be kind of difficult sometimes.
Q: How many patients do you see in a typical shift?
A: Probably around 30 to 40, myself. I know our department (sees) about 180 people in a day.
Q: Is there a myth you'd like to dispel about your job?
A: That it's all easy and we just push a button. It's not all a matter of having them lie down on a table and pushing a button. You really need a good knowledge of human anatomy and pathologies; knowing say, for example, a doctor is wondering about a certain bone being broken and you have to know what they're talking about so that you give them the right kind of X-ray to make a diagnosis.
Q: How many times can a person safely be X-rayed in their lifetime?
A: There's no set limit for developing certain types of cancer from radiation. Having said that, you obviously don't want to X-ray someone for no reason. It's kind of a balance between giving them the radiation and trying to figure out what's wrong.
Q: What did you want to be when you were a kid?
A: I wanted to play hockey for the rest of my life.
Q: How did you get into this field?
A: I was actually going to Capilano College; I wanted to do physiotherapy, and then kind of wasn't really enjoying that too much, and started looking around for something in healthcare because I wanted to do something with medicine, in that general area. I thought X-ray would be kind of interesting and applied for BCIT and that's where I went. It's one of the jobs where you get to work with all different types of doctors. You're working with radiologists and the emergency doctors and different surgeons.
Q: Is your job stressful?
A: Especially at our hospital, because we are a trauma hospital, it can be pretty stressful, pretty intense. We get people just walking off the street, all the way to people who have been in major accidents, and shooting victims and things like that. Every day is different; every hour can be different.
Q: Do you wear scrubs?
A: Yes. We have hospital scrubs that are the standard blue, or when we're in the operating room we wear green.
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