I passed!!!

Wow! I took my CT boards a week ago from today, and the results came in the mail this afternoon. And I got this cool patch to prove it! (I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with the patch, but it will end up in a box with my Radiography patch.)

So, a little bit about my job...It's amazing how far medicine has come in the last few years. Imaging alone has made so many technoloical advances, it really is amazing what we can do now. Computerized Tomography is one of the most amazing ways to see anatomy and pathology. I learn something new every day at my job. So here are a few pictures to show what I see every day.

This is a normal slice of an abdomen. In this picture you can see the liver, spleen, stomach, a kidney, bowel, ribs, thoracic vertebrae, and many blood vessels. This is only one image of about 70 or so that makes up one exam of the abdomen/pelvis.

I can also add color to a CT image. This is a slice of the brain, and the color helps to show abnormalities in the brain based on the flow of blood. The colors measure cerebral blood flow, cerebral blood volume, and how long blood stays in the brain.

This is some of the ways I can view and manipulate an image. This is all the same picture basically, just viewed in different ways.

Reminiscing...

The other day I was looking at some of our friends pictures from their trip to Thailand, and I was scrolling through their online albums and found these pictures of all of us from a few years ago. James grew up with Marlo and Jason, and all three boys got married within a few months of each other, so of course it was appropriate to have a combined "bachelors party"...mormon style, of course. So me, James, Marlo, and Deanna all drove up to Provo one night right before Jason and Sarah got married and the girls went shopping while the boys went out to dinner and exchanged silly gifts. We surprised the boys by coming home with matching Hooters shirts on over our clothes. What a night!

The Tooth Ball...

2.15.08 Last Friday we went to the dental school's annual "ToothBall" with Mike and Candice. It was really fun to get all dressed up and spend some time with each other. The night started with cocktails (which we didn't attend for), a nice dinner, a raffle, and then dancing. It was fun to meet some of the people James goes to school with! (Although some of them were a little drunk.) We also had a great time dancing. James loves to dance! In fact, we were one of the first few couples to start dancing while the other 400 or so people watched! They had a live band playing while we danced...it was a great!

The dinner started off with salads and rolls, followed by balsamic chicken with mashed potatoes and asparagus, and cake for dessert. It was pretty good!

This is the room that the dinner and dance were held in.

And of course, what would a dance hosted by the dental school be without a gigantic cake in the shape of a toothbrush and toothpaste??? I'm not really sure what they do with this cake...they served us a few different types of cake for dessert but never cut this one.

I think this picture is funny for two reasons...First of all, they had this cop patrolling the party the whole night and she looked so serious about her job! Also, the guy wearing the crown in the picture is the ToothBall King. Yes, they announced a King and Queen for the night...they don't mess around!

After we left the ToothBall, we went to the lab at the dental school and Candice and I tried our hand at drilling. This is me trying to drill on a tooth with a mirror. It's a lot harder than it looks!

I was pretty excited about finding this dress because it is a $100 dress from JC Penney that I got for 14.99...What a deal!

This is my attempt to get my hair all up...it's hard having short hair! It really didn't look that great at all, but here is how it looked at the end of the night!

This is the band playing Hang on Sloopy (of course with the added O-H-I-O chant!)