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The Unseen Burden of Others: How This Poignant Interaction I Had Yesterday Changed Me
As I may have said on here (perhaps several times)… I have done diagnostic testing, pre-screenings, and scribing for medical eye doctors and optometrists for the last 15 years. It is an often rewarding, sometimes soul-crushing, fast-paced, never-a-dull-moment, frequently BEAUTIFUL work environment that I have been grateful to be apart of for this long.
Ophthalmology, as it turns out, is a world unto itself as far as the medical field goes, and being able to work in it. You don’t actually need any sort of college degree to work with eyes. You can be hired on, and most large ophthalmology offices will provide paid training. That is essentially how I got started 15 years ago.
Now that the refresher with my work history is out of the way, I’ll talk about an uncomfortably profound experience I had at the office with a 70-something year old man who was having an eye exam:
I took back the second patient on yesterday’s schedule to an exam room at approx. 7:45am (while I was still about 73% awake). From the moment I brought the man back, I got the strong sense that he did not want to be here. He sighed frequently, wouldn’t look at me, and gave all one-word answers to my questions.
