Radiology Wife: National Find a Radiologist Month

If someone asks you what your husband does and you say he is a radiologist, you might as well have said he is a snuffleupagus.

See, the radiologist is the one that calls you doctor and tells them that when you slipped on your cat's dentures and fell face first into that bird bath you did, in fact, break your vomer into three pieces. Ouch. But really, the general public has no idea what a radiologist is.

Then again, a lot of physicians don't know much about radiologists either. To them, the radiologist is a mythological classification (like the tribe of Arimaspi) who they have heard about but never seen.

However, as the wife of a radiologist, I can assure you that they are much more than the voice at the other end of the phone or an ancient tribe of one-eyed men. So basically, as far as I can tell, there are two big reasons holding people back from discovering these great doctors in person. Let me try to clear up those points:

Radiation is scary. Radiologists deal with a scary and mythical substance called radiation. Radiation is so scary to people that they make up funny explanations to calm their nerves about being around it, such as the "banana equivalent dose." This whimsical unit of radiation exposure is informally defined as the additional dose a person will absorb from eating one banana.

I am assuming that this only succeeds in making people afraid to eat bananas and think that radiation is really strange thing and that radiologists are even stranger. I mean, can you get a banana equivalent dose from a radiologist? If you meet one should you give them a banana? If you run out of bananas should you offer another food that is rich in potassium, like potatoes, kidney beans, sunflower seeds or Brazil nuts?

Darkness makes it hard to see. Radiologists spend a lot of their time working in the dark. Most other doctors like to work with the lights on, which means that radiologists cannot work with them. This can make radiologists seems antisocial as well as making them hard to find. Radiologists are usually located by phone call, not by an actual person-to-person visit.

But besides the dark conditions making them physically hard to find, the dark can also be dismal or gloomy. The average person who spends too much time in the company of a radiologist might just burst into tears. This outburst is often falsely attributed to "lack of people skills" on the part of the radiologist. Actually it is a form of seasonal affective disorder on the part of the newcomer. You have to work up to spending that much time in the dark... or use a light therapy lamp.

So now that you know that you won't die of radiation and that you really can discover them amidst all that darkness here is what I suggest. September should be declared National Find a Radiologist Month. It should be a month and not just a day because radiologists are in fact hard to find. If you use you month wisely, you might even find more than one. When you do, tell them that the Radiology Wife sent you and bring a banana.