Borsha Sarker - Sonographer or Magician

Borsha Sarker – I’m a Sonographer, not a Magician………

……but I can understand why you might be confused!

This is my favourite quote from the internet that summarises the fascination I have for my chosen career. I often feel that I have been given a near magical ability to look into the inside of people and animals using the skills that have been passed on to me by a succession of inspiring clinicians who have gifted selflessly to me their time and passion for the profession and passion that is Medical Ultrasound. I’ve served my apprenticeship with some of the best teachers in the profession.

This often allows me to come up with an answer, which is sometimes the first inkling that something is seriously wrong and occasionally the astounding answer to a previously insolvable problem. Although many medical professions are science based, I feel ultrasound starts as a science and at its best becomes a fine and sometimes dark and mysterious art.

Of course, there is an immense amount of rapidly changing technology to get to grips with. When I found myself specialising in Doppler Ultrasound, blood vessels and haemodynamics, which is heavily physics based, one of my schoolteachers later expressed amazement that my chosen career was based on the subject at which I was most incapable at school. In this field, sheer determination can trump academic ability. It’s just truly surprising and inspiring.

Medical Ultrasound is completely unpredictable and has taken me from the scrutiny of the innards of the most intimate parts of the human body to finding myself with my arm up the backside of a Siberian tiger and scanning a cheetah’s kidneys on the BBC’s Animal Hospital. There is no such thing as a predictable day. Most recently I found myself teaching five year olds about ultrasound by letting them scan strawberries and other soft fruit in a bucket of water and using ultrasound to help some slightly older medical students learn anatomy.

It’s also a career that has allowed me to travel and work almost anywhere in the world. I spent almost two years in Australia and travelled all over the Pacific, inspired by a boss who travelled to Papua New Guinea collecting poisonous snakes and a sonographer who crewed a yacht around the Australian Coast in between her ultrasound jobs. I hope I have in turn inspired a few others along the way.