what is the typical work day like?
Not much different from a general diagnostic radiologist. Except that you typically get more interruptions to check studies before the patient leaves or to do small procedural stuff.
how is it different than adult radiologists?
You are dealing with kids !
Now that would be great in and by itself, the problem is that they come with 'crazed parents'. 'Crazed parents' come in many different flavors, two of which are the most prevalent and ahem 'challenging':
- Parent of a chronically ill child. Usually, the kid has Tsutsugamushy Kensington autosomal recessodominant dystropy of the lower thorax and a mother who is by now the worlds-expert on that syndrome (which you are naturally not). Because there is nothing else in her life left (including the dad of the unfortunate kid), the only joy she still has is to torture medical providers with her incessant attempts to put them down or demonstrate how much better informed she is.
- Suburban semi-wealthy parent of a healthy child that is subjected to the Muenchhausen by proxy attempts of his/her bored soccer-mom to find disease if there is none. Once you have done the third upper-GI on a nicely growing 4 month old for 'spitting up', you wonder when the kid will emit Cherenkov blue.
do you do any more procedures than a non-IR adult radiologist?
Depends a lot where you work. If you are a an academic place with a busy peds-uro service for example, you are going to do VCUGs until the cows come home. If you are 'the peds guy' in a private practice, you are probably going to do a similar procedure volume as any of the 'general' people.
is work hours and compensation comparable to adult rads?
Pedsrad used to be the kiss of death in radiology. It was poorly reimbursed and because you rarely have more than 2-3 pedsrads on a single service (outside of big childrens hospitals), call was unreasonably common. The main problem with pedsrads is that kids for the most part have crappy health insurance. Either they are on their parents crappy HMO, or they have medicaid/SCHIP or any other of the goverement plans. Neither of them pay decent.
That said, due to the increase in the use of MRI and CT in pedsrad coupled with a marked shortage, incomes have come up quite a bit in the last couple of years. To my knowledge they are pretty much average at this point.
Oh, and did I mention that I would rather have wooden splinters driven under my fingernails than sitting through another shift at childrens hospital ? Academic pediatricians are one of the most annoying groups of people I ever had the displeasure of dealing with (not the community guys, they are usually a bit too cuddly but otherwise laid back and reasonable people).
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