Beth Greeson, RPSGT, RRT

• What I do: “I’m a polysomnographer at the Center for Sleep Disorders at Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville. I score sleep studies from the night before, so that the physician can interpret the study and get results back to the patient within three to five days.

“I also do one-on-one patient consultations and orientations to the sleep center, and ongoing patient education.”

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BARRY WILLIAMS / AJC Special

Beth Greeson is a polysomnographer at Gwinnett Medical Center.

• What got me interested in this: “Having a child who needed a lot of respiratory therapy got me interested in this field. I had never heard of a respiratory therapist before that.

“I’ve been an RT at Gwinnett Medical for 20 years. It’s a taxing and stressful job, because you go wherever you are needed.

“Two years ago, I moved into sleep therapy because I wanted to learn something new, and this gave me another avenue to expand my career.”

• Best part of the job: “I can change patients’ lives overnight. They come in because they sleep terribly at night and are unhappy during the day. They feel so bad, but with CPAP [continuous positive airway pressure] titration, they will see an incredible change overnight. That makes my job very gratifying.”

• Most challenging part: “People who are claustrophobic are apprehensive. You really have to take time to get the right fit and make them comfortable with a mask.

“People are afraid of the testing process. We show them the center, educate and explain the importance of sleep before they come in for testing overnight. They see that they’ll have complete privacy. By educating patients, we ease their fears so that we can help them.”

• What people don’t know about my job: “People don’t really understand what we do. Just watching people sleep doesn’t sound like a hard job, but you have to be prepared to handle any emergency.

“Scoring the digitally recorded test is a long, detail-oriented process. You go through tedious amounts of information 30 seconds at a time, looking at brain activity, changes in respiration and oxygen levels, leg jerks and other abnormalities.”

• What keeps me going: “I love working with my team and helping my patients. We all test new equipment, so we can understand what our patients are going through and know that a lot of problems can be fixed.”

• Preparation needed: “Georgia doesn’t require people to be an RT to be a sleep tester, but I feel strongly that RT training makes you better prepared. Various schools train people in polysomnography. To become a registered polysomnographic technologist requires passing a national exam.”

• Salary range: $16 to $18 an hour for new RT grads and up to $30 an hour with more experience.

— By Laura Raines, Pulse editor. Got an interesting job that you love? E-mail your story to pulseeditor@ajc.com.