Despite

Today....we are burnt out. Bryce and I have been going at 100mph for the last month or so and it just doesn't feel like it's going to stop. I still have another 5 weeks until school is out and a million things to do before then.

But what I really want to remember from that time are the I miss you text messages, they times I walk to the clubhouse to say "hi" for a minute before studying. They 15 minute couch cuddle session when we haven't seen each other in two days. The times Bryce looks down the hall while were studying and tell me he loves me. The time we spent cooking dinner together today. The meals Bryce ate alone or cooked for me with no complaints. Even though life is hard, life is still GOOD and we still manage to find JOY despite the mountains we're climbing.

That's something to be happy about.

Things I've learned in optometry school

When I was on a nine-day mission trip in Mexico this past fall, I’d never seen a patient in my life. All of the sudden, I was seeing hundreds of patients in poorly dictated Spanish trying to look at the back of their retina, a skill I had prematurely learned that morning. The moment when I looked in the back of a patient’s eye and found the characteristic flame-shaped hemorrhages of Diabetic Retinopathy is a moment I will remember forever. A passion for service through Optometry had been lit, and I was hooked.  Even though I misspoke, and accidentally told more than hundred people “I love you”, I believe patients came and waited in line for hours for two reasons.

The first reason is that we were able to do something these patients had no means of doing for themselves. The people who waited in lines were often wearing scratched glasses held together with twisted wires and missing parts. This was the only chance they had to be able to read or see the faces of their loved ones because they couldn’t afford glasses.

The second reason is that patients trusted we were able to help them to solve their very real problems. The loss of vision can be devastating and scary when a patient doesn’t know if it will ever come back. Holding a patient’s worries in my clumsy first-year hands throughout an exam can be a bit overwhelming, but knowing I could give each person rest from their visual deficiencies rallied me to the challenge.

Graduate students usually all have stellar grades and resumes, so the thought of showing up to an event with limited knowledge and giving eye exams to someone can be daunting, but it should not stop students from serving! Because of my service experience in Mexico, I was able to teach students even farther along than me how to use direct ophthalmoscopy on a patient while volunteering at the West Valley Senior Center. As I volunteer every Sunday watching 18 month-old children at my local church, service based learning has given me the intuition to turn off the lights to stop a photophobic one-year-old won’t stop crying because her whole corneal epithelium had been burned off in the days prior.

Having a spirit of service means more than only showing up to serve. As I’ve served at children’s fairs, on school mission trips, high school clinics, and at senior centers this year, I’ve been exposed hundreds of unique patients. Being able to tell a patient where to go to get their vision back or what to do next is common knowledge to a student, but to a patient it is the information they have been searching for and direction they desperately need. Service has taught me to see the patient instead of just their chart. Through my service experiences I have found that the joy of serving comes from bringing joy to someone else. Although finding the perfect pair of used pink glasses for a nine-year old won’t likely be something I can put on my resume, the joy on her face is something I have carried with me ever since.