r/RadiationTherapy

So... the chief therapist at my clinic and I walked into the vault to fix a machine issue, then they left the room, closed the vault door (it is rather silent and hard to hear) and then beamed on with a warmup beam with me in the room. I yelled at them to beam off over room intercom but still most of it was delivered.

What do you do after an event like this???

Everyone seems to act like nothing happened, besides a Physics safety report and sending the old badge in to be read.

Does this... happen a lot? Is this something serious that should be addressed?

What the heck.

I'm looking into pursuing radiation therapy but I just still have so many questions and concerns. I'm finishing my main prerequisites and still have time to switch if I wanted to nursing come down to it. I wanted to ask some people in the field a few questions like

Was it hard to find a job?

Do you make more money than a Registered Nurse

How was your school experience

Average work day

Biggest Pro's and Cons.

Also any advice for school with me being in California would this be a good field to go into what do you think?

ARRT-side practice, so I built one page per ARRT exam content category: Patient Care, Radiation Physics, Simulation & Imaging, Brachytherapy, and QA & Safety. 20 questions each, and every single one has the full rationale — not just the answer, but why it's right and why the distractors are wrong.

Free to use, no signup wall on the questions. I'd genuinely rather have people flag anything that looks off so I can fix it — that's how the question bank on the main site got good.

Our go.Sim saves Daily/Monthly QA reports as PDFs locally. It runs on the Siemens local account (not domain-joined), with no network drive access, and USB isn't an option for us.

Has anyone set up export to a network share? Was it done by Siemens/your service vendor, and what did IT need to provide? Or do you send QA as DICOM to PACS/TPS instead?

Thanks!

I am applying for the semester in January and wanted to know when they require students to do their drug screening. I am legally allowed to use marijuana for medical use where I live but intend to quit before the program starts. Any current or former students could help answer would be greatly appreciated!

Hi all! 😃

In short, I've landed my dream career that isn't in the medical field at all. The pay, flexibility, benefits, etc... are all there. However, the job itself is incredibly toxic. Anything from lack of teamwork when it's a team oriented job, not being trained on basic tasks and getting expected to know how to do things, etc.

My goal here today isn't to discuss my job, I think I'm coming to a point in my mid-life where a job should be tolerable, but how tolerable it is depends on how you deal with it. Fulfillment and happiness should come from your life outside of work, the only thing any job can reliably provide is money and benefits, great managers and teams come and go, etc.

My question is, primarily for Dosimetry but Medical Physics (Alternate Dream Jobs) too, what are the realities of the job when it's bad? I know PA friends that have no work life balance, nurses bullying each other and hospital environments being awful are easy to find. I'd imagine a cancer center would still operate similar to a hospital environment?

With Dosimetry and Medical Physics, all I've been able to find scarcely is sometimes you'll have teams between Oncologists and Physicists that don't get along, don't communicate, and will have unrealistic demands for the dosimetrist. Dosimetrists will be working or getting called after hours for plans that they had all day to do, due to lack of communication from the MD's, etc. I read Oncologists can wreck entire Dosimetry teams due to simply ego, plans get denied because of ego... 🙃

Many hospitals are profit motivated, I imagine a cancer center is subject to this? Chronic understaffing is common in so many positions in the medical field, I'm sure it's common to be overworked in Dosimetry even if it's advertised as strictly 9-5? Patient wellbeing could be put on the back burner due to having to rush treatment plans because of understaffing?

Any job I've had in my life when ideal has been great, I'd really just like honest realities of when the job is bad what it looks like, and if it's prevalent just like many problems the medical field faces. I don't want to chase the wind with jobs anymore, I've had plenty of them. I'm not saying the work y'all do isn't incredible, it truly is, I just know there's no perfect job; I'd like to know what these jobs are actually like when they're bad behind closed doors.

Obviously, problems in nursing aren't talked about in nursing school, I'm sure it's the same for these careers like any other career/job I've had. Some careers are definitely worse than others, but largely it's up to the individual to decide what they want to tolerate. I'm not looking for perfection, just reality.

😃

TLDR: Every job I've ever had in life has had its unique drama and problems, it's very hard to find out the problems with Dosimetry and Medical Physics that people face, it's always sunshine and rainbows. These were my alternate dreams jobs, I'd love to know if I should accept my reality or inherit new problems! :)