Looking for a Future

2006-01-06 at 2:40 a.m.

I had a good Christmas, went home and saw my family. I came back down to London for New Year's Eve and had a good time with my friends in my local pub. Drank a little too much though, and spent the next day quietly. Though actually my hangover wasn't so bad, the real trouble came from my forgetting to take my medication on one evening! Two days of horrible side-effects mean I won't be doing that again!

I've been having some troubles lately, mostly with depression. I was taken aback at the hospital when in my review they said that I'd seemed like two different people, so much was the change between my moods in different halves of the week. Which is why I have (or rather my doctor has) considerably increased my medication. Though I am still not happy that he took me off the stabilisers, but nothing terrible has happened yet and, hopefully, won't.

The hospital work placement was less than ideal, as it turned out. We were there for a month, after six weeks of training. From the first, we were left alone with patients and it quickly became clear that there really isn't a lot to this job. In my opinion, they could easily train radiographers in a year, and there is no need for a three-year degree course. Much of the course itself is padding - for instance, we have an entire day devoted to "interprofessional communications" using techniques adopted from education, which is taught with us and occupational therapy students. The idea is that we learn what others do in the NHS and learn to work with them. However, radiographers do not work with occupational therapists and are unlikely to ever meet one in a work context. So it all seems a bit pointless. Plus those education things are the products of education research - and are of dubious value even in their original context. Everyone in the class hates that course and, thanks to that course, hates occupational therapists as well. The whole thing is a waste of time. We also have another day's class which replicates information given in the other two classes, and serves as a depository of miscellaneous information ("how to write an essay" etc). The only two classes of real use are the physics and anatomy classes. Anatomy I have no problems with, it is a good functional class for the job. Physics is too detailed for our needs, even in its pared-down form - we do not need to know how to put together an X-ray machine, that is the province of medical physicists. Given that this is basically a technologist's job, despite protests to the contrary, the course should be shortened. We have short teaching days, and at least one full day off a week - at best we have a four-day week. This whole course smacks of padding, perhaps because they want people to have the academic skills in order to do the qualifications which lead to more interesting posts after one has qualified to be a radiographer. Such as ultrasound.
The job itself is boring. It really is just button-pushing. You position the patient - which is not that hard, even despite constraints such as pain or that they simply cannot move that way - and then press a button. Then they're on their way. There are few communications skills used despite our being taught the importance of such skills. We simply do not see the patients for long, and to them we are just technicians, and unimportant.

And that is a problem for me. At the higher levels of the service, radiographers can make diagnoses. This is one of the things that attracted me to the course, one of the things that compensated for the repetitive nature of the job. Then I met some of these radiographers. "Diagnose"? Ha! They're called reporting radiographers and what they actually do is prioritise obvious cases of injury to free up doctors' time. So, someone has a big black cloud where a lung should be? Stick a mark on the X-ray and their doctor looks at that one first. Someone has a big bone sticking out of place, the sort of injury anyone could spot? Call the reporting radiographer to make their little mark and the doctor gets to play 'find the fracture'. Its really basic stuff, just a time-saving device dressed up to look like greater responsibility.
Even the most senior people are lower than the most junior of doctors - and what galls me is not having someone in authority over me, but the idea that I can never work up to their position.

I found the job boring and repetitive and leading to nothing more interesting. Even those with the training for the more interesting jobs still have to take their turn with the boring ones. And as they spend more and more time doing the same thing over and over the less friendly they become to patients, the more likely they are to shove them about and be rude and then just shove them out the door. I don't want to become like that.

There was one thing I liked in the month though, and that was the week I spent in fluoroscopy. I was fortunate in that I liked the radiographers who were supervising me, but I also liked the way that the doctors were around and could tell me what I was seeing on the screen, what everything meant and so on. I also helped out with the babies when they had them in one day. We were doing micturating cystograms and I was asked to hold the legs while the doctor put catheters into their bladders. And then we watched them urinate. Funny thing to find interesting really. But it was more hands on than everything else. Even theatre we were just standing there sweltering in our lead coats.

The whole time I was in the hospital I felt ungainly and stupid. I didn't know what I was doing most of the time and wasn't needed the rest of the time. I don't like touching people and would rather ask them to do things, which apparently is incorrect, I should just grab. My link tutor kept coming in and standing behind me, making me not like to talk in front of her, and then complained I did not speak enough. I got ill, I did my back in, got sinus problems, all sorts. I also felt my mental health slipping badly - hence the "two different people" comment during a week when I was too-happy and depressed with the same person around. I felt I was being judged on my moods. Which is not a good thing.

I don't know what to do now. I found myself looking forward to going to work at the hotel, but there are many things I don't like about working there either - chiefly the hours and the fact that I feel...uncertain in a job which requires no formal qualifications. I don't think I'm going to be going on with radiography but I'm not sure what else to do. This is my last spin of the wheel in terms of education, in a few years my dad will have retired and I must be able to live alone and be able to afford to do so whether in London or elsewhere. So I need to get qualified and get working soon. But I don't just want to drift - if I end up working in hospitality I want it to be because I have chosen to, not because I just wound up there.

All in all I am at a cross-roads but I do not know which turn to take. I'm worried I may regret any decision I do make because I am really struggling to keep on an even keel now in terms of my health. I have also come to a few unpleasant realisations, one of which is that I no longer feel I should be in a leadership role or in a role with much responsibility, because I cannot trust myself.

I never thought being bipolar would make a difference to my life - turns out it does.

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