My patient

I had my first mentally challenged patient today as well as a large staphyloma.  She was a middle aged, Spanish speaking, moderately intellectually disabled woman.  She was on an entire sheet of paper full of drugs and had schizophrenia.  The primary care doctor she saw in early January wrote that her vision was within normal limits.  But she had no light perception whatsoever in her left eye and they left her with 20/60 vision in the other.  I felt troubled when I discovered this.  He didn't do a proper job at making sure her vision was actually good.  It's as though it was automatically deemed as a futile effort in correcting her vision due to her disability.  Perhaps correcting vision won't be any better, but there are studies that patients with dementia or intellectual disabilities become more responsive with corrected vision.  But they just left her like this and didn't even give her a chance!  Nothing was known about her family history.  The care taker with pretty bad rheumatoid arthritis (just by looking at her knuckles) who brought her in kept saying, "I don't know.  She just came last year.  So we don't know anything."

The patient ended up having high anisometropia and a large staphyloma that basically ate up her macula and optic nerve in her left eye due to the pathological myopia.  Luckily, she came in to get glasses to correct her right eye as well as protect that eye with the spectacles.  I just loved how she held my hand down the hall.  I felt like she trusted me so much.

Growing pains of reality of work life and how other people live.  We can't fix everything.  I know...but there is beauty in the attempt?

There are days when I forget why I am doing optometry...but some of my patients remind me.

Tim Keller does a good job in reminding me as well :)

If God’s purpose for your job is that you serve the human community, then the way to serve God best is to do the job as well as it can be done.