Anyway, I decided to further clog the Internet with this blog because enough people asked me to keep them informed on my latest endeavors that I figured this would be the easiest way for me to do just that.
The history is: After five years in private practice as a general practitioner veterinarian, I made the decision to give it all up and pursue specialization in veterinary ophthalmology. Why, you ask? Two basic reasons:
1. I dig eyes
2. I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with a lot of what goes along with general practice. I went to school to practice medicine, and I was taught to base my decisions on evidence gleaned from a well thought out diagnostic plan. More and more, I was forced to play "guess the disease" and "let's make a deal" when it was time to treat it. Also, the longer I was away from school, the more the hows and whys of the medicine were being lost in my head to simplifications and client speak. In other words, because I was unable to use a lot of the medicine I learned, I was starting to lose it...and that was starting a vicious cycle of making the "guess work" harder. My realization of this was the tipping point. I needed to get myself in a place where finding the answer using all available resources was what I did.
The hard part about all of this was not knowing exactly what to do or where to start to get myself to that place. See, the way it usually works is you graduate from vet school, you get pummeled by an internship for a year, then you (hopefully) obtain a residency to focus your training on an area of specialty for 3 years, then you're set loose upon the world to wreck your havoc. Having bypassed step one 5 years ago, I didn't know if I could get back into the pipeline.
That's when fortune smiled upon me and I ran into Dr. Webb at a continuing education conference. Dr. Webb was an ophthalmology resident at Ohio State when I was a 4th year student in clinics and she has since become a prominent eye doc in Columbus. I basically cornered her, blurted out my intentions and, in full puppy-dog eyes mode, begged for any help she could offer. Her advice: start from the beginning. That meant an internship, even though I'd been doing the whole veterinarian thing for a while already. She also let me get in on a research project she and her colleagues were working on to boost my resume. It'll be weird, I know, but if I ever have a kid, it's first name will be Dr. Webb.
So, after the whole application process and all of it's pitfalls, I ended up at a place called Metropolitan Veterinary Hospital (aka "Metro") in Akron, Ohio.
My job description here is basically "slave labor." I will rotate through all of those areas you can seen on the sign, as well as ophthalmology, basically doing whatever crap jobs the specialists can think up. In the meantime, I'll (hopefully) be building relationships with these doctors and maybe even impressing them a little bit. The goal being to learn enough to improve my odds of finding the answer on any given case, as well as boost my resume enough that the overseers of ophthalmology residencies might deem me worthy to join their club.
That's the upside. The downside to all of this is I now live in Akron with my wife, Cindy's, parents. Cindy still lives in Dayton, Ohio with our two dogs, one cat, and bucket loads of fish. The other downside is that general practice paid the bills and being an intern means making roughly half of what I did before. If it all seems a little selfish, I can't argue that point, but I have been lucky enough to have a supportive wife and extremely generous in-laws.
That brings us up to date, for the most part. I'm one week into the internship and all I've done so far is fill out paperwork. That all changes on Monday, though, and I will make every effort to keep everyone posted on the happy-fun times that will ensue. I have some more pictures of Metro to check out below. I'll try to make this thing as visual as I can from here on out. Thanks for reading.
