thanks everyone! I will take a look. I did come across dicom_parser and dcmstack as I dig through various scripts and libraries and am learning about and learning to use them.
DICOMs are a quite a FUN format, eh? 
also, what are the best practices to specify and handle the file paths for DICOM files? its awkward to search for a single .dcm file within a folder of large number of files (without any criteria) to refer to an single subject single session image. If you are aware of a best practices guide/tips doc somewhere, let me know.