How does it feel to sit in a dark room all day?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 17408
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Deleted member 17408

How does sitting in a dark room all day make you guys feel? Do any of you ever feel depressed or wished that you could come out into the light for a while? :eek:
I'm asking because I have applied to radiology but I am very concerned about how I will feel sitting in the dark all day. I have never done it before outside of the 7 weeks of radiology rotation I took. However, that is just 7 weeks, and not 250+ weeks I would spend in the dark during my residency. Can anyone give an opinion on this. :confused:

Thanks in advance :)

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You've done about just as much rads as I have and I'd rather sit in the dark for 8-10 hours a day rather than answering pages all night and working through the next day after getting hardly any sleep on call. I'm doing medicine right now and I'm counting down the days till I'm able to sit in the dark all day and have some time to see my family.
 
I guess we do sit in the dark a lot on some rotations, but we see a whole lot more of the daylight than most specialties who are rounding on patients long before I make my merry way to work in the spectacular fresh morning sun. Oh and then I enjoy three or four hours of gorgeous afternoon sun on my patio reading about all those fascinating pathological entities that most specialties never hear of much less see. Rads has its down sides, but sitting in the dark aint one of them. That is why you learned about those cyclic AMP specific phosphodiesterase inhibiting methyl xanthines in biochem :) Trust me there is no better field in medicine than Rads and if you doubt that just wait for your clinical year and you will see the light (or lack there of).
 
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I have been doing Radiology for 13 years. At most, I spend 3 hours sitting down to read films. There is a lot of interactions with patients and referring physicians. THe stereotypes about radiologists are all wrong.
 
Well, I am doing a radiology elective now and I love it. I love sitting in a nice dark quiet room. We do however have some interaction mostly with residents and/or attendings either by phone or in person.

Let me give you an example. I am on a plain film rotation where we do mostly chest xrays with a sprinkling of abdominal films and bone plain films. Although CT/MRI/US/Nucs seemed much sexier to me at first. I have learned to appreciate the chest xray because I am actively reading the films and attendings ask me what I think. I am fascinated by the many subtle variations there can be in a chest xray and learning to distinguish normal variants from clinical lesions. Learning this normal vs abnormal and not over calling things takes a lot of judgement and experience. I feel my confidence level growing daily. I find my efficiency reading xrays improving as well. I have also developed a disciplined approach to reading the chest xray which allows me to find subtle but clinically important facts and to put them into a context of clinical history to make a diagnosis or a narrowed differential. It's when you find that subtle finding and help other clinicians with a finding that I feel tremendous satisfaction sitting in a dark room doing radiology. And this is just the plain films. I cannot wait to start body CT. :D
 
Some of the best things we do in life is in dimly lit rooms. Think about it. The best movies I've seen were in dimly lit rooms. Some of the best meals I've ever eaten were in dimly lit rooms. And, well, it seems like there's something else I really like to do in dimly lit rooms.
 
"Sitting in the dark" makes it sound as though you are in some type of solitary confinement. All of the previous remarks about good hours & limited time "in the dark" are correct, but remember this: Surgeons spend most of their natural lives in artificially lit rooms, most of them dark when doing some type of scope work. Internists spend their natural lives also doing scope work, or lurking about the dimmed rooms of the ICU. Everyone lives under the soft glow of flourescent lamps - something most people agree is uncomfortable at best. Now consider the dark. In radiology you are given the chance to sit in a controlled environement, soft drink on the clean (non-infectious) desk, comfortable chair under your rear-end. Then do consider the majority of the day as they conduct biopsies, drain lesions with CT guidence, review films with the other attending physicians. Finally - think of the toys! You could play with a stethascope to try to listen to a murmur or find the bruit, or you could use some state-of-the-art US machine that allows you to make measurements of blood flow rate and pressures across valves and stenotic areas. Radiologists have magnets that can map-out the cerebral vasculature far beyond the branching levels they taught you in gross/neuro anatomy class. It is the life!
 
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