#optometrists

When 2020 started, I thought it was just going to be jokes about optometry, but every month has really passed like:

Exactly 10 years ago today, I was standing in a muddy Kansas field watching the legendary Dodge City Outbreak unfold. 🌪️ It was an awe-inspiring, chaotic display of multiple tornadoes carving through the landscape simultaneously. People often ask me about the adrenaline of spending my springs inside the "bear’s cage" of supercells in the American Midwest. They assume that tracking a quarter-mile-wide wedge tornado must be the most stressful thing imaginable. But the truth? I often felt calmer staring down a rotating wall cloud than I do sitting six patients deep in a modern eye clinic. Trading the open road for the consulting room taught me a profound lesson: the clinical environment presents its own type of storm. Juggling clunky software, fighting administrative hoops, and managing conflicting local referral criteria creates a slow-moving front of decision fatigue. To mark this 10-year anniversary, I’ve written a deeply personal article looking at the 6 vital survival lessons the Great Plains taught me about mastering clinical uncertainty in optometry. From surviving a "Hitchcockian" Colorado motel to making split-second leadership calls under a green hailstorm sky, here is how a decade of chasing tornadoes completely reshaped my approach to patient care, professional resilience, and clinical advocacy. Read the full story, see some of my photographs, and discover how to out-navigate the systemic storms of modern practice below. 👇