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A typical day

You start around seven, check the schedule and set up your room. Each scan is 30 to 60 minutes with a patient on the table beside you, in a darkened room, while you hold a probe with one hand and drive the machine with the other. You take the images a radiologist or cardiologist will read, and you have to know when something looks wrong enough to fetch a doctor right now. Between patients you clean the probe, write up measurements and call the next name. Hospitals add evening, weekend and on-call emergency scans.