In the Eye of the Storm
“Be like the EYE of the storm, focused yet calm and aim for perfection”. A state of mind I suggest to all surgeons when I train them to handle complications of fellow eye surgeons.
With a practice that sees Lasik and Cataract surgery complications from all over the world for over two decades, I became familiar with the emotions and expectations of patients and their surgeons when facing a complication they either did not anticipate or handle well in surgical ability or personal compassion.
As a surgeon who receives such patients, it is important to accept the situation but also not short-change your desire to perfect the vision of such affected patients irrespective of the damage done or lack of empathy because only with a calm and unbiased mind can your hands move like an artist to restore vision.
With the recent passage of the deadly hurricane Irma and many more on their way, many Floridians and related people all over the world braced themselves to face what was called the Storm of a Century. The by-product of this unearthly event was that many were educated about the very anatomy of a hurricane.
The anatomy of a hurricane reveals high velocity winds with high turbulence most usually in an anti-clockwise direction, along with its inner walls which carries the maximum force, and usually is the driving factor of potential damage anywhere that hurricane lands.
The center of this hurricane though comes to lie in the EYE of the hurricane. Paradoxical to the force, turbulence, and destructive capacity of the periphery of a hurricane is the calm and serene but highly focused zone called the Eye or the hurricane. This eye is surrounded by the above mentioned high impact force areas of the hurricane called the walls.
It is this anatomical analogy that I use to teach surgeons when dealing with complex and complicated eye surgeries where I stress to them the need to refrain from creating a storm, a turbulence, by blaming the previous eye surgeons, blaming the technologies, blaming the patient, blaming the circumstance and destiny itself. But rather to become focused like the eye of the hurricane, despite all the turbulence around you, until the patient has perfect vision once again.
In surgery as in life, it is our approach that decides our endpoint. And only if we are focused like the eye of the hurricane, that very focus results in dramatic outcomes and yet with the calm and peace that is the prerequisite for the height of accuracy and gentle surgical maneuvers while repairing eye surgery from its “Vision storm”.
Eye surgeries, particularly those that are performed on normal eyes like LASIK or Cataract surgeries if they fail to produce 20/20 vision can result in emotional upheavals that if left tumultuous will spiral like a hurricane into destructive relations and final vision.
Many such cases of complications and side effects of LASIK or Cataract surgery can indeed be corrected to perfect 20/20 once again as long as the effected patient and their surgeon, or the surgeon correcting the complication, enters a state of calm to analyze the situation, come up with a custom-design repair plan, and then execute to perfection delivering vision with the same intense focus that the patient initially desired very much like that of an Eye of an hurricane.
Extending this philosophy to life itself, lets always find our Eye of the Hurricane and seek our position in it until that very storm of life passes and we emerge not only unscathed but actually enriched.