BLOG: Who am I? What am I doing? Why?
Man, 2020 was a wild ride, wasn’t it?
Every year or two, I sit down to remind you all (and myself) of just what it is that I’m doing in my blog, column and podcast here on Ocular Surgery News and Healio/OSN. This past year kinda shook everything up for most of us. It sure did for me. When my practice was shut down, it was the first time I wasn’t either going to school or to work when I woke up since I was 13 years old.
And yet, for me at least, there was a very strange but altogether real sense of Back to the Future about 2020. You see, all I did this year was go to work. Get up, go to the office or the OR, go home. Rinse and repeat. Kinda like almost all of you out there who have stumbled upon my treacle. You go to work. You spend the entirety of your professional life in the act of caring for your patients. No speaking gigs or advisory boards. The only time you get on a plane is when you are going on vacation. Or maybe AAO or ASCRS. Pretty much all I did was go to work and take care of my patients.
Just like I did for the first 15 or so years of my practice.
You see, unlike most of my friends who do the speaking/consulting thing, I stepped off the wheel in my early 30s to stay home after work. Well, as much help as a male physician of my generation could be. But I went home for dinner 50 weeks out of the year. Bob Dempsey calls it “D. White’s sabbatical.” 2020 was just like that, and it reminded me of just what it is I do when I am here, at my keyboard, in front of an audience or sitting in a board room: I am doing my best to represent the ophthalmologist who spends his or her working life caring for patients. In particular, on this blog at least, representing those of us who take care of dry eye patients.
My goal with this blog is to encourage anyone in the DED game to stick with it. It’s hard work, but in the end it’s worth it. I try to introduce both the basics of the game as well as some of the rare, unusual or just plain weird stuff. In doing that, I hope that these posts (and my column) are helpful to you when you are sitting at the slit lamp or leaning back in your chair and talking with your patients. It’s a blast to call out luminaries in the dry eye world. Some of them are among my closest friends (looking at you, Mark Milner), and some are people I will likely never have the pleasure of meeting but deserve to be better known (like you, Dr. Kathleen Digre!).
At the same time, it is painfully obvious to me that the majority of us don’t really have any idea what is happening in the industry that supports us (and that we support by using their stuff). Over the years I have tried to alert you to the goings-on in both the pharma and device worlds. The good (lots of new stuff in phase 3!), the bad (pandering to PBMs at the expense of our patients’ pocketbooks and our staff members’ sanity) and the ugly (it’s January; I’ll let sleeping dogs lie for now). You should know that I am not paid by any company to write about their stuff either here or in my column; they learn that they have shown up and what I think same time as you do. It pis, ahem, makes me angry when someone “pitches” me on a post or column about their product. That’s not how I roll.
Yep, 2020 was rough, but in the end, it reminded me that everything I do here is only possible because I go to work. I write about what I know. Not gonna lie, after a while I started to get back in the “just go to work” groove. Pretty sure that’s going to be fertile ground for the blog, the column and (yes, Tal) the podcast. Being an ophthalmologist is a cool gig. Writing about it, especially about DED?
Big responsibility for sure, but that’s pretty cool, too.
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