This coming year, we will be highlighting personal stories from our members, celebrating the guidance and support they’ve received from ISCD mentors throughout their journey in the bone health field. ISCD mentors inspire and ensure the next generation grows and thrives in our community. Understanding the importance and impact of these stories, we want to bring them to life. View more stories.
Larry Jankowski, CBDT
Chief DXA Technologist/Research Coordinator
Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, LLC
Larry Shares his Story…
In 1989, my nuclear medicine career was at a crossroads. I was not happy at my place of employment and was seriously thinking of changing careers completely. My neighbor was starting his own general contracting company and wanted to hire me as a carpenter, having helped him build decks, gazebos, and even shingle a few roofs as a part-time weekend gig. (I have always been handy with power tools and mechanically inclined). But as he was just starting out, he could only offer me part-time work and I needed something to fill in the other two days a week. Preferably a job that also offered health insurance benefits as I was also starting a family, just married, and had a thirty-year mortgage to service.
I saw an ad in the paper (yes, they had real newspaper want ads back then), for a part-time nuclear medicine technologist to do dual- and single photon absorptiometry scanning for a rheumatology practice. It also required the ability to maintain a Nuclear Regulatory Commission radioactive materials license, both of which I had done before. It was then that I met Dr. Susan Broy, a rheumatologist who was really into osteoporosis testing and treatment, even though at the time, there were only two approved drugs and one used off-label. She hired me within five minutes of the start of the interview. The job was 20 hours a week (two ten-hour days a week) and a perfect fit with my budding carpentry career.
She was a fantastic mentor. I had been doing DPA and SPA for my previous employer, but training was clearly see one, do one, teach one. Radiologists at this hospital never reviewed our work, or at least never complained about the results. Dr. Broy was the first doctor to ever come to me and tell me that she thought I incorrectly analyzed a spine scan! I felt honored to know she valued quality work, and explained the issue and why it was important to correct. She made me feel part of a team, part of her team.
Fast forward a few years and the DPA device was going to be retired as nuclear sources were no longer going to be available and I was introduced to our first DXA scanner. It was lightning fast! And took only 5-7 minutes a scan, rather than 20-40 minutes for DPA. It also allowed us, as one of the first DXA devices in the Chicagoland area, to participate in FDA phase two and three drug trials.
But the real mentorship began the day Dr. Broy ran into my scanning room with a huge smile and oozing with excitement to tell me that she just discovered that there was going to be a new society dedicated to bone densitometry called, not surprisingly, the Society of Densitometry (the “I” came a few years later). Not only that, she said they were having their first annual meeting in Washington DC, where the greatest minds in osteoporosis testing would be speaking. And, she said she was taking me with her, paying my hotel and airfare, and we were going to be like human sponges, soaking up everything they were teaching.
It was there that she introduced me to Dr. Paul Miller, bragging about my abilities to the point I was in a constant state of blushing. Apparently, it impressed the founding president of this new society, as two years later, I was elected Treasurer of the society! A year after that, at the first bone density course where physicians and technologists sat in on all the lectures, I started helping out other attendees with analyzing DXA scans.
The next year, someone thought I might actually know something about DXA, and I was asked to be one of the technologist course instructors.
Dr. Broy retired from her practice more than 10 years ago. Every time I think of her, I see that beaming face of excitement the day she ran into my room and invited me to the first SDC meeting. She treated me as an equal, and we spent three full days learning about this fledgling field. A unique value of the ISCD as well, where technologists and physicians are treated as equals. While I still do carpentry as a hobby, it was Susan Broy who took a chance on a geeky-looking thirty-something nuclear medicine tech that steered me away from hammers and saws. I never looked back and will never forget that day she invited me to the first SCD meeting, or her as my mentor.
