My hands shook just a little as I walked through the rotating doors of Waukesha Memorial Hospital. It was my first time job shadowing, and I had no idea what to expect. I had followed the dress code, brought a notebook and pen, and managed to feign a smile even though I felt like a zombie.

Of course, there was nothing to be worried about! I checked into the radiology desk and was picked up by an extremely nice Nuclear Medicine Technologist who gave me a brief tour of the department. She showed me four huge machines: two heart imaging machines, one single location machine, and one full body machine. She explained that nuclear medicine focuses on the function of organs rather than the physical shape. They look for malfunctions rather than defects.

I finally got to witness my first patient at about 8:30 a.m. They used nuclear ions to find lymph nodes in order to check for any cancer. It was amazing how they simply injected these ions into the skin and used the nuclear machine to watch where the ions absorbed. The lymph nodes almost looked like Christmas lights. They were in chains and glowed brightly in the node.

The next patients had the ions added to some of their blood and then transfused back into them. The machine image looked like a giant light blub, which I later discovered, was actually the blood flowing through their heart. The coolest part of this was that a new image was taken every spike of the heart beat so when put together you could watch the heart beat and could tell to what efficiency it was pumping. Watching a real heart working was breathtaking.

I also saw a PET scan, which takes a catskan of the entire body as well as a nuclear scan. Doctors would send cancer patients to have this scan done in order to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread from the original site. These scans took about two and a half hours, and were extremely meticulous. The technologist showed me tons of scans from past patients to show me how they identify both negative and positive scans. It was Anatomy 101 in action!

The final section I shadowed was imaging hearts. They would take the nuclear image with the patient at rest and then put them on a treadmill and then look at the heart under stress. Comparing the two images, the technologists would look for dark spots, which would indicate areas where the muscle wasn’t getting oxygen. They could also take the image of the beating heart and rotate it to look for any walls that were not beating.

I’m so happy I spent the time organizing this with Ms. Passler even though I had to get my TB test. The knowledge I gained was well worth the time and effort!