I didn’t expect to fall in love with the inside of people. But here we are.
I did not become a radiologic technology student expecting to feel anything about it. I went in because it was practical. A licensed, stable path that fit into a much larger and messier five-year plan. I was not prepared to actually like it. I definitely wasn’t prepared to love it.
But somewhere between my first positioning lab and my first real patient in clinicals, something shifted.
There is a particular kind of quiet in an X-ray room. Everyone else on the floor is moving fast, and for the sixty seconds you have with a patient, it’s just the two of you and a machine that can see through skin. You learn how to talk someone through fear in a language that isn’t really language. More of a steady voice, a hand placed just so, the small choreography of “big breath in, hold it, and relax.” You learn to read a person’s body without ever asking them to explain it out loud. That’s not nothing. That’s a kind of intimacy most jobs don’t offer.
I think what surprised me most is how much of this field is about translation. A radiograph isn’t just an image. It’s a patient’s pain, made legible. It’s the difference between “something feels wrong” and here is exactly where. I’ve spent a lot of my life being the person who had to translate her own pain to doctors who weren’t always listening. Somewhere in a dim room with a lead apron on, I started to understand that I could be on the other side of that conversation now. I could be the person who does listen, who finds the thing, who hands someone else the beginning of an answer. Well, the eyes of the person who hopefully does that for them.
There’s an odd irony I think about more than I expected to. I left a job that was replaceable by AI for what might be one of the medical jobs AI ends up doing a lot of in the coming years. That’s not lost on me, and if I’m honest, it’s a little scary to sit with. I try not to dwell on it too long, but it’s there. I can see that AI will probably soon read radiograph better than any human eyes can. And more and more of what I do will become the snide comment of us just being there to take the picture.
Some days the hardest part isn’t the physical work. It’s the not-saying. The speak no evil curse you’ve willing embedded on your own soul. You see something on the image. You have a decent guess what it means. And you can’t say a word, because you’re the tech, not the radiologist, and it isn’t your place to name someone’s fear in that moment even when you can already see the shape of it. I’m still learning how to hold that silence without it costing me something. Because Lord Almighty I want to scream it sometimes. At the top of my lungs. Like a full on war cry so even the gods can hear your diagnosis (would that break HIPAA?).
There are also days the room itself gets to you. Stuck in the same four walls for hours, machine humming, door closed, no sunlight ten hours into a twelve hour shift. It starts to feel a little like being sealed into one of those Markiplier Iron Lung runs, just you and the walls and the low dread of not knowing what’s outside them. Dramatic, maybe. But anyone who’s spent a full shift in a windowless room will understand exactly what I mean. It’s a little like a submarine in some places. Lots of recycled air.
But underneath all of that is a joy I didn’t see coming: being handed a puzzle. A body that needs to be positioned exactly right, an order that needs to be interpreted, a problem with only one correct answer if you look closely enough. My brain, organizing, neurodivergent, always looking for the pattern, genuinely lights up for that part. It might be my favorite part of the whole job. Solving the puzzle.
That’s the part I didn’t expect to fall in love with. Not just the technology, not even the science, though both are genuinely fascinating. It’s the translation, the puzzle, and the strange privilege of being useful in someone’s worst hour in a way that’s precise and calm and kind, all at once.
I still have a long way to go as a radiologic technology student. But for the first time in a while, I’m looking forward to being tested.
โ Lauren ๐๐ป
Lauren Grace Zemel Writer ยท Model ยท Radiologic Technology Student ยท Wellness Explorer
South Florida based creative building a life at the intersection of science, storytelling, and community. Gentle Strength is my home base.
๐ธ @laurengracezemel ๐ฟ laurengracezemel.com