My interest in medicine and caring for people was formed at an early age. I lost my mother to cancer when I was 12, and so I, unfortunately, spent a considerable amount of time during my childhood in hospitals and dealing with illness.

A couple of years after my mother died, I took up playing the drums. It provided me with an outlet to express myself creatively, and this is still true today. It taught me that practice, hard work, commitment to excellence, and continually trying to improve my abilities were needed to excel. I think I apply those same ideals to medicine and surgery in constantly trying to improve the care I provide my patients. It is important to me to teach and to continually research new ideas.

As a beginning fourth-year med student, I suffered a serious facial injury with broken bones, after colliding with a teammate during a competitive softball championship. The severity of the injury left me unable to continue my rotation in orthopedics, but I needed to continue my clinical training and chose to work with an ophthalmologist in his private practice. After four weeks of watching him care for patients in his office, while also performing amazing surgeries, it was clear this is what I needed to do. My interests in medicine, physiology, physics, optics, and mathematics, while also performing microsurgery, fit the specialty perfectly. The coordination, ambidexterity and hand control I learned from drumming help me as an eye surgeon.

Today, I can’t see myself doing anything else. The progressive nature of the field, with rapid improvements underway in vision correction through my own efforts and those of my colleagues, make my practice extremely gratifying, challenging, and humbling.

A recent patient, who had seen several other eye doctors before seeing me, had extreme myopia and cataracts, and desperately wanted to improve her vision while achieving some independence from the glasses she had worn since childhood. Her case was complex, and I spent a fair amount of time explaining her options. At one point she asked me why I was devoting so much time to her. She had never had a physician do that, and she was skeptical. She ultimately allowed me to remove her cataract and implant a new multifocal lens. In the recovery room several minutes after her surgery I checked on her and removed her eye shield. She could immediately see both far and close for the first time in her life, and the look on her face and in her eyes said it all. I reminded her of her question to me before the surgery and explained that being allowed to participate in this moment with her was the reason I spent so much time with her.

My life is equally full outside of medicine. I am a very involved dad with my three children. I help coach my kids’ sports teams and look forward to watching them grow. I still love to play the drums.