From Diagnostic to Interventional: Exploring the Evolution of a Radiologic Technologist

Welcome back to another episode of A Couple of Rad Techs Podcast! Today, we have a very special guest joining us, Lake Odom, an experienced interventional radiologic technologist. In this episode, Lake shares their journey into the world of interventional radiology and the fascinating intricacies of their work. From the importance of protective gear and the advancements in technology to the challenges and rewards of being an interventional rad tech, Lake dives deep into their experiences and expertise. Stay tuned as we unravel the mysteries of interventional radiology and gain valuable insights from Lake. Let's dive in!

Lake Odom is an experienced interventional specialist who has been practicing since 2010. During his tech school years, Lake discovered his passion for interventional work and decided to pursue it as a career. Fortunately, he was able to join a two-semester program at a nearby community college, which provided him with hands-on training in interventional and cardiac cath procedures. Unlike many interventional specialists who undergo on-the-job training, Lake was fortunate to have a didactic program accompanying his clinical rotations. Through these rotations, he had the opportunity to work with various doctors and gain insights from different perspectives, enhancing his skills and knowledge in the field. Lake firmly believes that having a diverse background in interventional techniques is crucial for success in this profession.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lakeodom
https://www.irtechtips.com/

[00:02:40] Radiologists unsure about separate interventional groups soon. Interventional is minimally invasive image-guided surgery. Can involve draining, aspirating, or working on arteries.
[00:05:04] Active role in patient care, excitement of interventional, constant learning, new technologies.
[00:07:36] Top three common procedures in interventional radiology?
[00:12:53] New clot aspiration device removes blockage.
[00:14:14] Radiologists are essential and skilled; doctors rely on them.
[00:18:06] Interventional cardiology has higher radiation dose.
[00:20:31] Different shifts and hours in various places.
[00:24:00] Lots of good info about intervention, please share more of your experience in education and training, we need these conversations.

higher dose of radiation, interventional cardiology, radiology, protective lead hats, arm shields, gloves, technology, radiation dose reduction, Phillips machine, newer machine, specialized field, hands-on experience, outpatient job, equipment maintenance, smaller outpatient labs, diagnostic outpatient setting, cleaning tasks, longer cases, clot removal, catheter technique, penumbra device, bypass graft, mantras, misconceptions about radiologists, interventional radiology rotation, job offer, radiologic technologists, interventional procedure, Lake Odom, interventional training, clinical sites, uncertainty among radiologists, minimally invasive surgery

Transcript

0:40

Welcome you guys to our podcast, A Couple of Rad Techs Podcasts. I am Chaundria, and today we'll delve into the world of interventional radiology. Join me as I interview a seasoned technologist. Lake Odom. Lake Odom is coming from North Carolina. He is an interventional radiologic technologist, a trainer an educator and we're gonna talk all things interventional. So if that interests you, if you've never heard of it, if you wanna know more, if you are a radiologic technology student, definitely tune into this podcast. Welcome Lake to our podcast, and tell us who you are, what it is that you do for our audience. Thanks. Lake Odom. I have been doing interventional since 2010, 2011. I knew by like my third semester in tech school that this is what I wanted to do. I was lucky enough that there was a little program like a two semester program at a neighboring county community college that allowed me to do interventional and cardiac cath. And that's one of the things about interventional is it's almost always done, like on the job training, training. And I was lucky enough to get like a didactic program that went along with it. Along with having four clinical sites that I got to rotate. So I mean, three of those were cardiac cath related, but it allowed me to work with a bunch of different doctors and understand a bunch of different perspectives, which is one of the, the best things that you can be in interventional is have a, have a background of different ways to do the same thing. Yeah. And so I worked in a couple of outpatient places. I worked in a dialysis access center. I worked in a hospital setting for about six and a half years, and I worked in industry and I've worked in an O B L that was focused on high-end embolization, like prostate artery embolization, and I did about a thousand of those cases. And I'm starting a new job that I just started the last couple weeks at a hospital that involves doing stroke as well. Oh wow. So that, okay, so you just really piqued my interest in a lot of things you said, because we're gonna talk about where Interventionalists going because 20 something years ago. When I rotated in school for interventional, you know, all you see is in the hospital. You know, just kind of those basic things. And you just opened up, I think, a can of worms of this conversation when you talked about all of those different specialties and what you're into now. So can you just briefly explain to everyone what is interventional radiology and how does it differ from traditional diagnostic radiology? That's a great question that even the radiologists are trying to figure out. And you're right, there may or may not be a split of separate groups where like interventional. Are working separate from the diagnostic guys in the very near future. I think there's a trend in that. But interventional is minimally invasive surgery image guided surgery through small access holes, typically in arteries and veins, but other parts of the body where you either need to put a drain in something or Aspirate out some fluid. So you may put a drain in a kidney or a gallbladder because they're infected. You may aspirate some fluid around somebody's lung or someone's abdomen because of liver cirrhosis, and you may work on their arteries all throughout their body or their venous system for pelvic congestion in women varicose seal in men. Or dialysis access, keeping people able to be on those machines and run appropriately when they get on the dialysis machine through their, through their arterial to venous system. So like hemodialysis where para. Yeah. dad was on dialysis. Was for 18 years, so I'm pretty familiar with that. Yeah, so like That site, it would be an interventionalist or a interventional nephrologist in an outpatient setting their job to maintain that access. And if that access fails, they'll put in a temporary or permanent dialysis access. And there's even endovascular ways to create fistulas now with either magnets or like an ultrasound like hook thing. Okay, so you talked about, I wanna kind of go back because there are gonna be people listening who are saying, oh, I want, that's exciting. I wanna get into intervention. Oh, he mentioned surgery and I mean, You talked about getting into the vascular system. So you know, there are some people, they are really into that. And then you mentioned you could do it in an outpatient setting. Most people think surgery in a hospital, you know, down scrubbing. But we are talking a, a type of radiology surgery where it can be either be done outpatient as well. So what inspired you into to go in a path of the career of interventional radiology? Yeah, so, and this isn't to take away from anything in diagnostic, but I just enjoyed being an active part of patient care. When, you know, if you see something, say you get, you see a broken arm on, on x-ray, it's somebody else's job to fix it. Now if I see a broken vessel or something, it's our job to fix it. So switching into that more active part of care was something that really excited me about interventional and it just moves at this pace where And you're al you're always doing something new, even if it's the same procedure every time. There's something different about it. So you're constantly learning. New technologies come out all the time and there'll be something that's happening in a parallel lab or something. And you, you learned a brand new technology that's been, that you didn't know about it yesterday. So did you go to, I'm gonna get this question, so I'm gonna go ahead and just put it out now. Did you go to radiology school first or did you go to interventional school? Like how does that work? Well, yeah. So I know that Mr. And is trending that way. I know ultrasound is separate. I know nuke med is separate. Interventional will probably never be separate. So my letters are R vi. So I sat for a separate registry and I had to do like 200 exams only, but I could only do 20 of the same, and it's still pretty similar. And they all ask you a bunch of questions when you sit for the registry that are about the pathology and the anatomy. A lot like the regular x-ray exam. So I sat for that, like the day that I Finished school for traditional x-ray and then I got my, got all my stuff and studied. It's a really challenging exam, but yeah, it's that, that's how you get into it. It, it's that. only imagine. Yeah, there's just a lot of material that you have to cover when it comes to interventional and very few for the interventional registry right now. And very few labs are seeing the whole thing, like you would have to be in a very special lab in order to see everything that you're gonna be tested on. So it takes a little bit of extra study when it comes to sitting for that registry. Yeah, and I like how you, you prefaced what you said because I think I went to school for radiology as well. I was a top technol technological student there. My tech skill, technology skills grad, I enjoyed x-ray, but like you I knew that there was more beyond the di diagnostic realm of x-ray. I didn't leave for a specialty modality because I didn't like x-ray. It's, it's the basis of everything. I know, even though I do CT a little bit of mammo Mr. I've done applications and education. It is just another layer to what restarted which is diagnostic x-ray. And, you know, I absolutely love it. I mean, I, I wish I could, my mind could I, what we do is so specialized, I think no matter what modality you're in, that if I tried to go back to X right now, after 20 something years, they would probably tell me, go take two seats and you know, you're slowing us down. You know, because you have, our field is something where you have to be hands on. You gotta stay in it. And, and it's really a lot of fun and I'm, I'm enjoying this conversation. So let me ask you this other question. When it comes to most common procedures that you perform in interventional radiology, what would be maybe your top three? So it, it's really lab dependent. So in my first hospital job, It would've been dialysis, fistula, grams, and interventions followed by paracentesis. And so it would've been like a, a an an X-ray case, a fluoro case, an ultrasound case, and maybe some thyroid biopsies. Those were pretty common for us, but those were the two main when I did outpatient For with the interventional nephrologist, it was dialysis, fistula grams, and dialysis catheter placements all day every day. Mm-hmm. This this current job that I'm in, it's kind of split the, there's neuro intervention and there's regular body intervention and it's a cancer center, so there's a lot of chest ports and lines. That get done more than anything else. So it's like tunneled PICC lines, or they're called power lines. They, they're like neck sticks, Yeah. Chest ports, dialysis catheters, and then the neuro is doing like cerebral angiograms. So they don't have any ultrasound cases that come to their department. They have kind of, it's being done in a separate area where At my previous job, we ended up with the ultrasound interventions in our department. 'cause we got really good at 'em. So we could just move where if that ultrasound department who wasn't used to doing it, it would take them four times as long just because they don't have those efficiencies set in. Hmm. Interesting. That the, that's a good, that is great. I, I appreciate you setting that up like that because as people listen, they're gonna, most people, I, I, I, I listen to students and they're like, I just wanna work outpatient 'cause I wanna sit down. You don't always just sit down and outpatient. Outpatient can sometimes be just as busy, if not busier than a hospital. Would you agree? So the, the outpatient job I just left. I did all the ordering, I did all the inventory. If the printer was broken, I was the one that was asked to see if I could fix it. Like I didn't sit down because I was the only technologist. And that's the way that a lot of outpatient labs are set up that are smaller. You, you may have one or two technologists and like, I was responsible for the x-ray camera, so if it didn't start talking to the network, that like I had to troubleshoot it, so I never stopped. But like if you are in a diagnostic outpatient setting, it may be different at like an urgent care, but people aren't gonna let you sit down. They're gonna ask you to like, help clean the rooms and do other things. So in this job there's not really that many opportunities to sit down unless. you're in like a longer case where it takes that, you know, like an MR or like an extended nuke med exam. Yeah, Like, but that's, but you're taking care of the patient the whole time. That just may, you may get five minutes to sit down. right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great, that's great. Okay, perfect. So when it comes to your most memorable, you've been doing this for a while, so what would be your most memorable procedure that you performed in interventional radiology? Okay, let's see. I just knocked the camera out. Let me, Oh let me get me back in frame. We so at, at my first hospital job, I was working with a vascular surgeon and she had a, a bypass graft that was going to in, in one of the legs and it went down. and she texted me, she's like, can you come in and help me get this clot out? And I said, sure, but you gotta run it by my manager. Because vascular surgery at that hospital had never called anyone in, had never worked in IR suite. But I was like, I can do it. Just make sure everybody else knows. 'cause like we can't just be going wild in the lab. Right And so I come in and she's trying to get this clot out with this technique with a, with a catheter and it just wasn't working. And we had a new device, it's called a penumbra. It's basically a clot aspiration system that's been used to, like its current indications would be to suck clot out of like a. I'm not sure if it's on label for a lung, but it can be used in the lung. It can be used in the leg to suck, clot. It can be used to suck clot out of a fistula or the brain as well. So it's just like a, a suction canister, but a sterile one. And it's a little bit more high-tech than that, but that's an easy way to explain it. So she had never seen this device. I looked at her and said, Hey, do you want to try this? I know how to work the device. And you'll just, you trust me. And she said, of course. And we set it up. We did one pass and the thing, her bypass graft looked like it was brand new when we were done. What? Oh my goodness. So I feel so grateful and lucky that she trusted me enough to like use a device that she had never seen before. So like it was just It, it, it was just really nice that she trusted me, so that's one of my, one of my favorite stories to tell That is a really good story because I know you've run into this all the time where people think literally, we just hand doctors tools. We just press buttons. We just have a, we're just there. All we do is get the radio. They're interventional. My rotation through interventional, I think I did like a couple months because I finished all of my clinical exams in school the first year instead of taking the two years because I really wanted to rotate through everything radiology had I enjoyed interventional I was offered a job to learn on a job. Once I graduated school, just wasn't able to take a lot of the call. That's why I didn't take it, but it was. It was one of the top things, and just because of what you just said, I think really is gonna be one of my sound bites because people really need to understand and technologists need to understand too. Radiologic technologists need to understand that we are very essential to the field. Doctors do look to us especially when we are highly skilled at what we do, which obviously you are that A doctor who has never even used a interventional before, called and said, Hey, can we do it? And you were able to, you knew your tools, you knew your job, and able to actually use something for the benefit of the patient. And that was actually my next question. How did it benefit the patient? Can you talk a little bit more because I'm vis, I can see it as you're talking, like I saw the whole story as you were talking. I can see, I don't know what the device looks like, but I can see, you know, what's going on in the X-ray and see it clearing that out. What exactly Is it that you guys, if you could kind of paint it for our, our listeners, people that don't really know anything about it, how, how would you kind of portray that as to what happened? Because I'm thinking vacuum and I see this clock getting sucked out, and that's exciting. So basically you have this line of contrast that's going down and just stops, and then there's a gap and the contrast starts. So you can just imagine that this chunk that's like this big on one side of contrast and the other is just blank. And if you take the device and run it past the The clot and you turn the aspiration on and you pull it back through, it'll just pick up the clot and you can watch how fast the blood is moving through the line to know whether or not it you're just pulling straight blood or if you've got into a clot. And so we did one pass it made. The sound that it was supposed to make. And then it was just running like freely, so you knew that it grabs, it was in flowing blood, grabbed something and then was back in flowing blood. So you knew it grabbed something and then you, you manage it with the little switch to turn the suction on and off in the line. And we just took a picture and there the gap was gone or the, the blank space was gone. I that was that. And that's why he's an educator. You guys, he just took that in. Explained, and I really believe people understand now you actually shed light on the, some of the misconceptions that people have, especially about interventional radiology and radiologic technologists and how we truly do bring our expertise. It benefits the entire medical field. I do wanna talk about safety because some people wonder why I'm standing inside of there with all that radiation all the time. You know, can women work in there? I want to have a baby or men. We're all being radiated. How, what safety measures and exposure are to yourself and to the patient as well. The best shield that you have in that is the doctors. So you make sure he's standing between you and the table. The two. They're the ones that really need to go a little bit extra and above and beyond when it comes to radiation safety. I think there's a small study out there that like a lot of cardia, a small sample size of cardiologists we're getting I'm gonna say this improperly, but blastomas Oh. in, in their brain because they were Interventional cardiologist and interventional cardiology puts out a way higher dose than radiology does most of the time because they have to follow, like the beating heart picture and they're going through the chest and the tube is angled. So there's a lot more dose when it comes to Cardiac cath versus regular interventional. But I'm wearing lead. The doctor's wearing lead somewhere. Protective lead hats. There are arm shields if people want them as well. There's gloves, but I think that's a little too, too over the top, just because you still need to be able to feel what you're doing because your whole job is like in these Is right here for the most part. Once you get access then there's shields from the ceiling. There's shields in the bottom that hang from the table most of the time. And as the machines get better, the dose is getting reduced by like a quarter. The place that I, I just started, they had an older Phillips machine that was putting out. We'll just say a gray for a case. That same case will be done on their brand new Phillips machine that we're training on this week. We're probably like between two to three 50 re so like, Oh At the, some of the tubes are a lot hotter on older generation technologies. So yeah. I watched one of the machines switch and we had, we had a similar process and the dose was just unbelievably, it was like a third from room to room in my old ho at my old hospital. So, That was, those are great tips. So we're winding down. I think this has been an excellent conversation and you know, I, I mean, it is just enlightened me so much. I really think our radiology students that listen in any of the texts I know I would be interested after this op, this podcast in looking more into interventional. So hopefully this inspires technologists that maybe feel burnt out in the fields that they're in to go look at interventional because it is an option, like you said, to learn on the job with some some didactic courses as well. But work life balance. A lot of people wonder, oh my goodness, I'm gonna have to take a lot of call. What light can you shed on that as far as how to maintain work life balance and interventional radiology? So it really just depends because a lot of places, Have a lot of different shifts. So I work with people that do eights, tens, twelves part-time, full-time, and they just kinda divvy up the call based off that. Now the place that I'm working has made a big effort to eliminate a lot of that stuff, and they put like night shifts on and weekend staff, so I was fortunate at my previous hospital. I was in a university health system and we were the community hospital. So very few things got us out of bed in the middle of the night. So like that is nice. But when you're in a big community or a, like a trauma one center or university setting, you're gonna have call and you're probably gonna get called in a lot. So if you're looking for excuse me. If you're looking for something with Les Call a community hospital or an O B L is an option for you. Just know that if you go to an O B L, you might have limited hours because they may not work every day because they have a clinic day, or you may End up doing a lot more work, like ordering and inventory and you may be helping with that clinic day by like cleaning the rooms or something else. So it's all, you're gonna give up something or you gotta sacrifice something because you either get a lot of staff and not a whole lot of call or. Like no call, but you don't have a lot of staff to kind of help with the ancillary stuffs and you kind of have to learn where all these products come from and how to order and stuff like that. So it, like, I've always just found balance because. We've had five people on call, but there are definitely some places that were ba that you may end up taking call 20, 25 days out of the year outta the month. And that's a lot. And that's unfortunate. Yeah. Well this has been a great conversation. I would love for you to leave our listeners with maybe just some information that you found beneficial when it comes to interventional radiology or, or, or tip, just something you would like to share to end out our podcast. Yeah. If you decide to get an interventional radiology, I keep two little things in the back of my brain two little mantras that I have. The enemy of good is better everything is doctor dependent. So what those two things mean to me, the enemy of good is better. You can keep ballooning something and something else will pop up. But at some point you just gotta stop because you're just fiddling. And everything, being doctor dependent, that means like, I am not, like, I may have control of the table, but I shouldn't get frustrated if the doctor wants something different than I what I thought. So that just gives me room to not, well, he's not doing what I want to do. It is not about me. It's really not even about the doctor. It's about the patient. And so like if he changes his plan, everything, his doctor dependent leaves me in that space to not be that it didn't follow my plan. Okay, Well, you have left us with a lot of, a lot of good information about intervention. I hope you come back and share more of your years of experience, not only as a technologist in interventional radiology, but in education, in training, because these are conversations in our field that we need to continue to have because many people, Get into radiology and don't understand the opportunities that they have in this field. You do not have to leave radiology I mean, I, 21 years, I have only reached, scratched the surface and there's so many more things that I could do, and I'm grateful to this field and grateful for you for being a guest on the podcast and sharing about interventional radiology. Thank you for having me. Okay.