Latest / The Ric and Dan Show / "I don't want my kids to listen to this episode": Doctor Curt Young of Vision Care of Maine

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"I don't want my kids to listen to this episode": Doctor Curt Young of Vision Care of Maine · The Ric and Dan Show

• 0:00
  (Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Can you pass me the coffee hound coffee package?
• 0:03
  I don't know because I want to hold it up and I want to see can you read it from this far away, Dan?
• 0:08
  I can. Go ahead. What's it say? Wander. Explore. Caffeinate. Coffee Hound. Coffee Company. Coffee Hound. Coffee Co. dot com.
• 0:14
  You see our friend Chris Keegan from Aristo County Way.
• 0:17
  Coffee Hound Coffee is the exclusive sponsor of our podcast and they have packed a lovely parting gift for you. Perfect.
• 0:23
  Thank you. Can you read any of that from that far away? This premium coffee is aged in a whiskey barrel for 60...
• 0:30
  Nope. 45 days.
• 0:32
  He's Rick Tyler and he's Dan Cashman.
• 0:34
  And I'm Dr. Kurt Young with Vision Care Maine. And I am on The Rick and Dan Show.
• 0:38
  In Maine, we often hear you can't get there from here.
• 0:41
  These are the stories of the risk takers, the trailblazers, those who turn obstacles into opportunities every day and found their way to get there from here.
• 0:50
  And today they're on The Rick and Dan Show.
• 0:54
  Do you have that Snell and I chart memorized by chance?
• 0:56
  Well, they're different. You can. Do they swap them out?
• 0:59
  Yeah, they swap them out.
• 1:00
  And like in the cartoons, is there really fine print at the bottom?
• 1:02
  Snell and I chart printed by, you know, Chicago, Illinois, 60609.
• 1:05
  Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Copyright with it. Yeah.
• 1:08
  When I was just a youngster.
• 1:09
  A strapping young man.
• 1:10
  Strapping young man. My mother likes to tell this story that my first eye doctor appointment, they said, what's the smallest line you can read?
• 1:18
  Concentrating real hard. And my mom says, come on, Danny, you can read it.
• 1:23
  And I was trying to figure out what the word was.
• 1:25
  I could see the letters fine.
• 1:27
  I just couldn't pronounce the word because there was no word because it was all consonants.
• 1:32
  And my mom was like, maybe Danny needs help in other things than his eyes.
• 1:37
  I wonder, do you ever have patients that look at the eye chart and say, I'd like to buy a vowel, please, for 250 bucks?
• 1:43
  We have a saying, you can't get 20, 20 vision out of a 20, 40 brain, though.
• 1:49
  What's the difference between an ophthalmologist, optometrist, and what's the other one?
• 1:57
  Ophthalmologist? Is there an ophthalmologist, ophthalmologist and an optometrist?
• 2:02
  No, there's a ophthalmologist.
• 2:04
  An ophthalmologist is a MD, a medical doctor, went to medical school.
• 2:09
  And that's you.
• 2:09
  That's me. Correct.
• 2:10
  So you do medical school and then you do a residency and fellowship in the eye.
• 2:17
  And that's usually four to six years after medical school.
• 2:20
  An optometrist is a doctor, not a medical doctor in the sense that he went to medical school, but a doctor of the eye.
• 2:29
  And their profession started by prescribing glasses, seeing emergency patients and triaging them to a medical doctor.
• 2:37
  But over the years, their career and their scope has widened.
• 2:41
  So they do more clinic work and glaucoma and macular degeneration.
• 2:45
  And when they get to a point, they need more surgical intervention now is usually when they refer to us.
• 2:51
  And then they call you.
• 2:52
  Sure. So their scope is widening.
• 2:54
  So they now do everything from glasses to prescribing eye drops to, you know, just general eye care, medical and optomic.
• 3:02
  At what point do you have to decide on a path from those options?
• 3:07
  As a patient?
• 3:08
  No, no, as you, as a profession.
• 3:10
  Yeah. What am I going to be when I grow up?
• 3:12
  Or is it like you pick one early on and just go for it?
• 3:16
  Seems like you take almost a I don't know anything.
• 3:19
  I'm just a dope on a podcast.
• 3:21
  But it seems like you take a road and then there is literally like a fork in the road and you have a few different options.
• 3:27
  Is that fair to say?
• 3:28
  Is it like the game of life?
• 3:29
  Right. Exactly.
• 3:30
  I have a choice. I can go this way and go this way.
• 3:32
  Yeah.
• 3:32
  You know, I think everybody's path is different how they get to the point.
• 3:37
  But there's certainly points when you have to make decisions.
• 3:40
  Do you want to do optometry or ophthalmology or anything, you know, to go to college?
• 3:46
  So you need a four year college degree at that point.
• 3:49
  It doesn't matter.
• 3:50
  Really, most are kind of premed kind of classes, which is just general biology, physiology, pathophysiology, that kind of thing.
• 3:58
  I think for optometry more, they're more focused on the optomic kind of pathway when they're starting college because there's some accelerated programs.
• 4:07
  And I'm certainly not an expert on that.
• 4:09
  But usually after college is when you kind of have to decide if you want to go the optometry route or the medical school route in ophthalmology.
• 4:18
  Were you ever at that fork in the road?
• 4:19
  I so my dad was an ophthalmologist and he was an excellent, excellent surgeon and he loved to operate.
• 4:27
  So I grew up in his office.
• 4:28
  I worked in his office.
• 4:29
  I was around the kitchen table all the time talking about the eye.
• 4:33
  For me, I loved the eye and I loved eye surgery from a very young age.
• 4:38
  And so I knew that's what I wanted to do.
• 4:41
  So when I was in high school looking at colleges, you know, I was looking at premed and my dad was actually don't do it and do something else.
• 4:49
  He didn't like the way medicine was going.
• 4:51
  He thought by now, you know, medicine would be socialized and government controlled and not what it was when he was practicing.
• 4:58
  And his point was, you'll spend four years in college kind of doing premed, which is just an ambiguous kind of path.
• 5:06
  When in four years you have a premed degree, which if you don't go on, doesn't really mean that much.
• 5:11
  And he said, do nursing.
• 5:13
  He said, it's a four year degree.
• 5:15
  At the end, you'll know really quick if you like working with patients, if you like being in the hospitals and you'll know really fast.
• 5:23
  And if you like it, you can go on.
• 5:25
  And if you don't, as a nurse, you can work anywhere in the country within a week and in a profession that you'll make a good living on.
• 5:32
  So that was his recommendation for me, which I did.
• 5:36
  I went to nursing school and after nursing school, I did nurse practitioner.
• 5:41
  And then after nurse practitioner, I just I loved the eye and I loved operating and I liked what my dad did.
• 5:47
  So I went on.
• 5:48
  And from that pathway, that was my route.
• 5:51
  Did you have a conversation with him and say, look, dad, I got the nursing degree and I'm going to go on.
• 5:56
  But I know you told me not to.
• 5:57
  But you know what? I really like what's going on here.
• 6:00
  And did he just go, oh, no, no.
• 6:02
  He was I think he was really happy.
• 6:03
  I chose that route.
• 6:05
  He's kind of proud, right?
• 6:05
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 6:06
  When I graduated, I got to work with him for a couple of years before he passed away.
• 6:11
  But, you know, growing up, we always went to meetings like every year.
• 6:15
  You have to get so many credits to continue with your medical license.
• 6:18
  And the meetings are in California and Hawaii.
• 6:21
  And, you know, they rotate around the U.S.
• 6:22
  So we always got to go to great cities in the U.S.
• 6:26
  And that's kind of sweet.
• 6:27
  And I would go into the meetings with dad and sit through lectures and stuff.
• 6:30
  And at some point it went from just being a son sitting there to being a colleague.
• 6:35
  And that was a great transition.
• 6:37
  That's amazing.
• 6:38
  And I like the locations.
• 6:39
  I don't hear you saying like, oh, we got to go to Nebraska and northern Minnesota.
• 6:44
  Well, every state has its own society that does their own CME credits.
• 6:49
  Like they do one here in Maine.
• 6:50
  That's an excellent, excellent one.
• 6:52
  But, yeah, I usually choose the places you want to visit.
• 6:55
  Of course.
• 6:55
  I've heard you say a few times already that you love the eye.
• 6:59
  What is it about it that appealed to you at a young age and kind of carried through?
• 7:04
  In nursing, I learned that I liked being with patients.
• 7:07
  And the patients I like being with were elderly.
• 7:10
  And in the hospital, it's elderly patients that are usually really sick.
• 7:15
  In ophthalmology, it's not the case.
• 7:17
  Usually it's a pretty healthy patient that's sitting in front of me,
• 7:21
  you know, that just is having some eye trouble.
• 7:23
  So the patient population in ophthalmology for me is great.
• 7:27
  I really like it.
• 7:28
  And then the microsurgery, the cataract surgery, the retina surgery,
• 7:33
  it's so fine and precise.
• 7:36
  And so you need so much concentration.
• 7:38
  And it's just something that I'm naturally good at.
• 7:40
  And that drew me towards that.
• 7:42
  You got to get really close to people, don't you?
• 7:44
  This is my microphone.
• 7:45
  The patient, you know, is about this far from me, maybe a little closer.
• 7:49
  Because, well, the movies, you know, there's that thing they take out
• 7:52
  and they look in your eye and they close one eye and look over here,
• 7:55
  look into the light.
• 7:55
  Right. And they always use that wrong.
• 7:57
  Okay. Do they?
• 7:58
  They do.
• 7:59
  Okay. Bust a myth for us.
• 8:01
  Usually they have it backwards or they're...
• 8:04
  One, actually one specific movie I can remember is it was a Tom Cruise movie
• 8:08
  where he's Days of Thunder and Nicole Kidman is a doctor
• 8:12
  and she's looking into his eye.
• 8:14
  And you're talking about a direct ophthalmoscope,
• 8:17
  which is an instrument to look.
• 8:18
  And the way she was using it, you don't use it that way
• 8:22
  because if you have it to your eye and you're looking at the patient's left eye,
• 8:25
  you're like kissing them.
• 8:26
  So you have to like, you know, switch eyes on.
• 8:29
  And so she did it backwards.
• 8:31
  And that was...
• 8:32
  I can see you with popcorn in the theater going, that's not right.
• 8:35
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 8:36
  My wife hates watching those kind of shows because I'm like,
• 8:39
  you know, a surgeon will scrub his hands and then put on gloves
• 8:42
  and then adjust his mask.
• 8:43
  It's like you can't do that.
• 8:44
  You know, nobody touches their mask after you scrub because you contaminate.
• 8:47
  So so I always pick up that stuff and it just drives me crazy.
• 8:51
  It's like the millions of dollars they spend on production.
• 8:53
  I would have, you know, given them advice for free.
• 8:55
  Wow. Maybe stick to watching Elf or something.
• 8:58
  Yeah, right. You don't have to worry about it.
• 9:00
  By the way, it's her favorite movie.
• 9:04
  You traveled a lot with your dad.
• 9:06
  Yeah. And now you travel a lot every single month.
• 9:10
  You're racking up a lot of miles driving hither and yon to take care of people.
• 9:15
  Another thing that drew me to ophthalmology was I knew I loved Northern Maine
• 9:19
  and I wanted to be up in this area and, you know, looking forward.
• 9:23
  It's like, what can I do as a profession to, you know, my dad had a lifestyle
• 9:27
  that I really liked.
• 9:29
  And, you know, it's like, how can I continue that?
• 9:31
  And and it just seemed like taking over his business up here
• 9:34
  was kind of a natural thing.
• 9:36
  And his kind of mission statement was people in Northern Maine
• 9:40
  deserve the same quality eye care campus kind of eye care
• 9:44
  that that you can get in Boston.
• 9:46
  And so his goal was to be accessible to to patients
• 9:50
  throughout Northern Maine, to be within 45 minutes of an eye clinic
• 9:54
  and within an hour and a half or so of the surgery center.
• 9:57
  So as he grew through Maine, he started in Presque Isle
• 10:00
  and then expanded to Caribou and then into
• 10:04
  Matawaska and to Lincoln and Millinocket
• 10:08
  and then eventually down to Bangor.
• 10:10
  When he came to Bangor, he was trying to kind of unite all the ophthalmologists
• 10:14
  and optometrists kind of together into one center.
• 10:16
  So, you know, control over negotiating rates
• 10:19
  because you're one entity negotiating instead of scattered.
• 10:23
  And he recognized that in certain areas
• 10:26
  there was too many optometrists and too many ophthalmologists
• 10:29
  and if they were placed better.
• 10:31
  So his goal was to kind of bring eye care together
• 10:34
  and everybody be under one EMR, you know, one medical record system
• 10:39
  and, you know, working together because the communication
• 10:42
  between offices, he saw that as a big hindrance.
• 10:45
  And that's vision care.
• 10:47
  And that's vision care.
• 10:48
  Yeah. Vision care.
• 10:49
  Well, you know, Bangor North, we have a surgery center, an office in Bangor
• 10:54
  and we have an office in Holton and we have a surgery center
• 10:57
  office in Presque Isle and we have an office in Matawaska.
• 11:00
  How far west do you go?
• 11:02
  I used to go to Dover, but, you know, we stopped doing that
• 11:06
  because some of the hospitals have started bringing in their own.
• 11:10
  And it's there's not enough in those areas to compete.
• 11:13
  So they bring in people.
• 11:15
  We kind of pull out.
• 11:16
  You must be intimately familiar with Interstate 95 north of Old Town.
• 11:19
  I am. Yeah, I drive it quite a bit.
• 11:21
  I drive probably probably 4000 to 5000 miles a month,
• 11:26
  probably 40 to 50000 miles a year.
• 11:29
  And that's something else where I'm weird.
• 11:31
  I love driving and driving through northern Maine is I just love it.
• 11:35
  As we talk, it's this time of year. This is nice.
• 11:37
  The leaves haven't started really to change yet.
• 11:39
  But what happens when the snow flies?
• 11:41
  Well, actually, I think this is the least interesting time to drive.
• 11:45
  Everything's great.
• 11:46
  OK, I really like the fall is magnificent.
• 11:49
  I love driving in blizzards.
• 11:51
  I mean, it's challenging.
• 11:52
  And my patients know if they have an appointment with me
• 11:55
  that I will be there no matter what the weather's doing.
• 11:58
  Never late. I didn't say that.
• 12:01
  I'm late on the sunny days sometimes.
• 12:03
  So, you know, it's we the only way our business works is efficiency.
• 12:09
  We're like the airlines.
• 12:10
  We have to pack our schedules.
• 12:12
  And if there's an emergency, I deal with it then and there.
• 12:15
  And overall, my patients understand that sometimes that means
• 12:18
  they have to wait, but they know if they come to me with an emergency
• 12:21
  that I'll take care of them then and there, too.
• 12:24
  What are people doing wrong with their eyes that they just don't realize it?
• 12:28
  I have an answer in my head.
• 12:30
  I've already been wrong about the ophthalmologist ophthalmologist thing,
• 12:33
  so I don't want to go too, too far here.
• 12:34
  But I think I have an idea as to something that people are doing today
• 12:38
  that is really not good for them.
• 12:42
  My answer to that's always been contact lenses.
• 12:44
  People really sometimes overwear contact lenses
• 12:48
  and they don't think it's really a big thing.
• 12:50
  But the way the surface of your eye gets oxygen is through the air,
• 12:54
  you know, contacting there's no blood vessels.
• 12:56
  That's why the cornea is clear.
• 12:58
  The front window of the eye, you put a contact over that.
• 13:02
  And it, you know, not only affects the oxygen
• 13:05
  that's getting to the surface, but it also is irritating.
• 13:08
  It's like always rubbing, you know.
• 13:11
  So people tend to sleep in them and, you know, don't change them out.
• 13:15
  Don't clean them enough.
• 13:17
  And they kind of just take it for granted that they put it in and it feels good.
• 13:20
  But it can kind of harbor bacteria and you can get really bad infections.
• 13:24
  See, the consultant when I worked at WLVZ News Center, too, said,
• 13:28
  you know, do you need those classes?
• 13:29
  Well, you know, can you do contacts?
• 13:31
  And I tried contacts and I tried.
• 13:34
  Yeah. Oh, Doc, I tried.
• 13:35
  I looked like the poster child for Visine because my eyes were so bloodshot
• 13:40
  because I was kept trying to put them in.
• 13:42
  And eventually I'm on the anchor desk and people are looking at me like,
• 13:45
  are you smoking weed or something?
• 13:46
  Because my eyes were all bloodshot.
• 13:48
  I'm like, no, I'm trying this.
• 13:50
  Well, yes, I just surrender.
• 13:53
  But yeah, but no.
• 13:55
  But yeah, just during the commercials, though, it's fine.
• 13:57
  I thought screens.
• 13:59
  Absolutely. Screening, especially high blood pressure, diabetes.
• 14:04
  You know, if you have those two diseases, you should have a dilated exam,
• 14:08
  not an eye exam where you're looked at and check for glasses,
• 14:11
  but a dilated eye exam where your retina is examined and photographed.
• 14:16
  I mean, we have such excellent technology for getting high definition
• 14:21
  retinal images, looking for very early changes
• 14:24
  that can be vision threatening, that if there was more screening
• 14:28
  and more yearly exams, there'd be much more vision loss in those diseases.
• 14:31
  When I said screens,
• 14:33
  I thought one of the things that people must be doing too much to hurt their eyes
• 14:37
  was staring at a screen, meaning, you know, we got your phone right here
• 14:42
  or your iPad or some electronic device or gaming.
• 14:45
  No, you know.
• 14:47
  So really, when you're you're concentrating on near reading a book,
• 14:51
  your blink rate goes down.
• 14:52
  So your eye tends to get more dried out.
• 14:56
  But, you know, near work for long periods of time doesn't really hurt.
• 14:59
  I don't want my kids to listen to this episode
• 15:02
  because I tell them I don't want to do the limit screen time.
• 15:05
  Yeah. And I tell them it's going to hurt their eyes.
• 15:07
  And I'm going to I'm just going to be like, yeah, I mean,
• 15:10
  if you're under 18, it definitely hurts your eyes.
• 15:13
  Thank you.
• 15:13
  When I was a kid is we didn't have, you know, phones
• 15:16
  and computers were just sort of becoming a thing.
• 15:20
  Watching TV too close to the TV.
• 15:22
  I was told that's going to hurt your eyes.
• 15:24
  Was that my parents just trying to get me to back up or was that a real thing?
• 15:27
  Yeah, that's that's not a real thing.
• 15:29
  They can give you a headache because it's hard.
• 15:32
  Sometimes it's hard to focus when you're close and that continuous focus
• 15:36
  and strain on the muscles that are, you know, focusing your eye
• 15:39
  can give you a headache, but it's not bad.
• 15:42
  It doesn't hurt your eye.
• 15:44
  I'm fascinated.
• 15:45
  OK, there were other things our parents told us and said,
• 15:47
  if you keep doing that, you're going to need glasses.
• 15:49
  Please tell me that was not true either.
• 15:51
  That's not true. OK, thank you.
• 15:53
  This is the best podcast ever. Explain, Rick. No.
• 15:58
  What if you have to wear glasses and can't wear contacts?
• 16:01
  What's that mean?
• 16:02
  So but back to the contacts and getting this back on track slightly.
• 16:06
  I'm with Rick. I can't.
• 16:08
  I've never tried contacts, but it freaks me out.
• 16:10
  The idea of putting a finger in my eye that's got something so thin on it.
• 16:15
  I just can't get past it.
• 16:16
  What do you tell people that that have that same sort of like squirmy nature to it?
• 16:21
  Yeah, so I never deal with contacts.
• 16:24
  That's a optometrist that that does that.
• 16:28
  I mean, I deal with them, but yeah, it's
• 16:32
  so I wear contacts, OK?
• 16:34
  I wear a contact in my right eye.
• 16:36
  I'm nearsighted, so I can read with my left eye.
• 16:39
  And I've never worn contacts until maybe,
• 16:43
  you know, maybe eight years ago, 10 years now when I started losing my near vision.
• 16:48
  And I ski and snowmobile.
• 16:50
  So glasses are just terrible for those kind of things.
• 16:54
  So I said, I'm going to try a contact.
• 16:57
  And I put it in.
• 16:58
  I had my optometrist fit me for it at my office.
• 17:01
  And, you know, we have contact lens fitting rooms.
• 17:04
  We teach you how to do it.
• 17:05
  And we're sitting in front of a mirror.
• 17:07
  Is it tough to get that appointment?
• 17:09
  It is actually. It's very hard.
• 17:11
  And anywhere in the state, you know, it's optometry is a very
• 17:14
  sought after appointment all through Maine.
• 17:18
  But to get you in there and preferential treatment.
• 17:20
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:21
  I was I was able to get in.
• 17:23
  You know, it was a canceled appointment.
• 17:24
  So I walked in and so he fit me and he's like, OK, this is how you put him in.
• 17:29
  He's like, you want to sit and I'm like, no, no, I'm good.
• 17:31
  You know, I don't need it.
• 17:32
  I went home and I could not get that contact.
• 17:34
  And I literally spent hours trying to get that thing.
• 17:37
  And I went back and I'm like, Dr.
• 17:40
  Gamble, I, I, you know, so so I hated him.
• 17:44
  And when I first used them, I'm like, I cannot do this.
• 17:47
  Forget it. And I threw it out.
• 17:49
  But then I went skiing again and my glasses are fogging up all day.
• 17:52
  And I'm like, all right, I'm putting a contact in and I am not taking it out for a week.
• 17:56
  I am just putting it in there.
• 17:57
  And no matter what, leaving in.
• 17:59
  And within a couple of days, which, by the way, you should not do.
• 18:02
  I was going to say actually physician, but I was just trying to force myself.
• 18:07
  And so, yeah, within about a day and a half, I got used to that.
• 18:11
  So I don't need to wear glasses.
• 18:13
  I can see up close. I can see distance.
• 18:16
  But it's practice. It's hard.
• 18:18
  Some people, usually women, have no problems.
• 18:21
  They can touch their eye.
• 18:22
  And usually the big, strong men cannot touch their eye.
• 18:26
  They pass out. They, you know, they squeeze tight.
• 18:29
  It's not a part of eye care that I enjoy, which is why I operate.
• 18:34
  Someone told me when I was having it.
• 18:35
  First of all, Elizabeth was in the other room saying, don't be a wuss.
• 18:38
  Don't be a wuss.
• 18:39
  And I'm like, you're not the one who's doing it, Tony.
• 18:41
  No. But they said and someone said to me, it's all and it was a hockey reference.
• 18:45
  This is shots on goal, shots on goal.
• 18:47
  You got to keep trying until, you know, you succeed.
• 18:50
  That's right.
• 18:51
  And I just couldn't, I just couldn't say it was worth it.
• 18:54
  If you were motivated enough, you would get it, you know, but I think like I was.
• 18:59
  But glasses work.
• 19:00
  You know, you see better with glasses than you can with contacts.
• 19:03
  It's just optically, as long as your lenses are clean.
• 19:06
  What do you make of the kids who will wear these days glasses?
• 19:09
  They don't need glasses, but they'll wear glasses
• 19:11
  because they're those blue light glasses,
• 19:14
  because they're spending so much time in front of screens.
• 19:16
  Those kind of filters, they can slow down cataract formation, that kind of thing.
• 19:22
  It's really. Yeah.
• 19:23
  That's why you wear sunglasses when you're outside to filter out the ultraviolet
• 19:27
  lights and, you know, ultraviolet causes dryness on the surface.
• 19:31
  It causes cataracts and cause, you know, retinal damage, too.
• 19:34
  So I mean, sunglasses outside are very important.
• 19:37
  But my youngest wears glasses because someone told him that you look good in glasses.
• 19:41
  Sure. Right. So yeah.
• 19:42
  In the 80s, people were trying to get out of their glasses.
• 19:45
  Ninety, you know, doing LASIK to get out.
• 19:47
  And now glasses are coming back in.
• 19:49
  It's a kind of a fashion thing.
• 19:50
  You know, it comes and goes like like any other fashion.
• 19:53
  LASIK, again, that makes me just wince a little bit.
• 19:56
  Yeah. I mentioned the contacts, but I get squeamish
• 19:59
  even thinking about anything having to do with my eyes and things happening with my eyes.
• 20:03
  Is that common for people or are people just sort of.
• 20:06
  That's everybody. What do you tell them to calm down?
• 20:09
  I tell them that this is something, you know, we do all the time,
• 20:12
  that it's normal to be nervous for something, a procedure like that.
• 20:16
  You can hire Elizabeth to come on and say, don't be a wuss.
• 20:18
  Right. Don't be a wuss.
• 20:20
  I find that's very effective.
• 20:21
  Most people do great.
• 20:23
  We can numb your eye up with topical drops.
• 20:25
  And if you're having discomfort, we can do an injection
• 20:28
  like lidocaine around the eye to numb the eye up.
• 20:31
  See that? Oh, you say that so nonchalantly.
• 20:34
  I literally just got sick to my stomach.
• 20:37
  We never do that with cataract surgery or with LASIK, do an injection.
• 20:41
  Topical is, I mean, ninety nine point nine nine enough for anybody.
• 20:45
  Creepy, clockwork orange.
• 20:46
  And they can force the eye to stay open.
• 20:48
  And when we do cataract surgery, you know, the eye is numb topically
• 20:52
  and we make an incision and then we could put, you know, through the incision.
• 20:56
  I see. To talk. That's no better.
• 21:00
  But the way that you talk about it, like I talk about walking down the street,
• 21:04
  though, is it's so impressive to me that it's just I mean,
• 21:06
  I know you've trained for this and this is what you do,
• 21:08
  but I can't let you get through a sentence talking about it.
• 21:11
  And it's just like back of your hand.
• 21:13
  That's so impressive to me.
• 21:14
  It's like anything you do, a lot of it.
• 21:16
  And, you know, it's second hand, second nature.
• 21:18
  I've done I don't even know, thousands, 12,000, 15,000 cataract surgeries.
• 21:24
  Is that like two per person?
• 21:26
  Because they have no eyes. Yeah.
• 21:27
  Well, it would be the surgery is separate.
• 21:29
  Multiply that times two.
• 21:31
  Yeah. Six thousand patients, 12,000 eyes.
• 21:33
  When you were on the desk for the night show.
• 21:35
  For some reason, I want to say
• 21:36
  there were some shows where you wore glasses, some shows you didn't wear glasses.
• 21:40
  The earlier days, I didn't have glasses.
• 21:42
  Turns out I had I was getting headaches.
• 21:44
  And one day I was sitting at a stoplight.
• 21:46
  I don't know if you wanted the long story, but, you know, here you go.
• 21:49
  I was sitting at the stoplight in front of Bangor Mall.
• 21:51
  And there was a sign and I realized it was blurry.
• 21:54
  And I closed my left eye and I said, oh, well, it's blurry.
• 21:58
  That must be the problem is my right eye is having a problem.
• 22:01
  So then I close my right eye and the left eye, it was still blurry.
• 22:04
  And I said, oh, God, this isn't good.
• 22:06
  Turns out I had astigmatism in both eyes.
• 22:08
  And then I got the corrective lenses.
• 22:11
  And so for the last, I don't know, eight years of the night show,
• 22:14
  I had to wear glasses.
• 22:15
  And on that day, the guy in the car next to you thought you were winking at him.
• 22:17
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 22:18
  We exchanged numbers and I was like, dude, I'm not interested.
• 22:20
  But like whatever.
• 22:22
  So you had to do the same for News Center.
• 22:25
  I had to have a special meeting with the consultant.
• 22:27
  Lynn Gartley was her name, came up from Texas because they consulted
• 22:30
  all the people at all the television stations for Gannett.
• 22:33
  And I just said, I'm trying, but I just can't do it.
• 22:36
  She said, OK, just set it aside.
• 22:37
  You don't really need it.
• 22:38
  You can read the teleprompter fine.
• 22:40
  Just take off your glasses and just go without.
• 22:42
  So I did. And Elizabeth approved.
• 22:44
  And really, that's all that mattered.
• 22:46
  Yeah. Or at least to me, it's all that mattered.
• 22:48
  I probably could have gone without glasses, if not for cue cards,
• 22:51
  because they were just far enough away that as my eyes
• 22:54
  like towards the end of the night, they would get tired.
• 22:56
  And I just I couldn't read it anymore.
• 22:57
  So I had to get glasses like the Snellen chart.
• 23:00
  It is Snellen, right? Snellen.
• 23:01
  Snellen is the people that make those eye charts that you look at.
• 23:04
  I did not know that they mix them up.
• 23:06
  A lot of C's, P's, F's, Z's.
• 23:09
  That's as far as I got.
• 23:10
  A, P, E, O, T, F.
• 23:11
  That's one of the lines.
• 23:12
  That's the 2025 line.
• 23:13
  So you got it all memorized.
• 23:15
  Well, so I went in and took my driver's test.
• 23:19
  This is funny already.
• 23:21
  A couple of months ago, and I didn't have.
• 23:24
  So I'm I'm like 20, 50 distance without anything.
• 23:29
  So instead of wearing contacts, I prefer to be a little blurry for distance
• 23:33
  and have just great ear because most of my world is here when I'm working.
• 23:37
  That close to.
• 23:37
  And yeah, so I went the way we went to D.C.
• 23:41
  for the America 250, 4th of July.
• 23:44
  And we drove and took a week, two weeks driving down.
• 23:48
  And and my driver's license was expired.
• 23:51
  So I'm in between clinics and in going between Mattawaska and Presque
• 23:56
  Island, I go to the caribou office to do it.
• 23:58
  And I didn't have any glasses and I didn't have my contact in.
• 24:01
  And yeah, so I just read the line from memory
• 24:05
  in the past that the test.
• 24:09
  Just to stop in his sleepers and caribou and get a set of readers.
• 24:13
  No, I don't need readers.
• 24:14
  I'm looking.
• 24:15
  We've got them scattered around the house.
• 24:17
  I've got some at the radio station when I need them.
• 24:19
  I've got some at my desk.
• 24:20
  That's my vision plan.
• 24:21
  Yeah. For going into old age.
• 24:23
  Yeah. Well, you're going to really like cataract surgery when the time comes.
• 24:27
  You know, I don't want to talk.
• 24:28
  I'll come see.
• 24:29
  I'll come see you, Kurt.
• 24:30
  But I'm just we can we can put all that glasses, power,
• 24:34
  all the astigmatism correction right inside the eye.
• 24:36
  You'll really like it when the time comes.
• 24:38
  I do wonder what I miss.
• 24:39
  You don't know what you are missing vision wise until you make some change.
• 24:44
  Well, you're not.
• 24:45
  I can tell by your glasses.
• 24:46
  You're not terrible.
• 24:46
  But I have some patients.
• 24:48
  I'm like, if you don't have your glasses, like if you ran over in your car,
• 24:51
  you are disabled.
• 24:52
  You know, you are you can't do anything.
• 24:54
  You can't see.
• 24:55
  And cataract surgery changes that for those patients
• 24:58
  just because you can put pretty much any power lens
• 25:01
  in the eye you want to when you take the cataract out.
• 25:04
  Do you have a challenging time advising older,
• 25:08
  says the 61 year old guy, advising older patients that,
• 25:13
  hey, maybe this is something you should explore?
• 25:15
  So the hardest part with cataract surgery,
• 25:18
  I think probably the two hardest is one.
• 25:21
  They come on so slow.
• 25:22
  You don't know you're losing vision.
• 25:24
  So you can be where you won't pass a driver's test.
• 25:27
  And that's a lot of times when patients come in
• 25:30
  as they've gone to take a driver's test and they can't pass.
• 25:33
  But it happens so slow.
• 25:34
  You don't notice it.
• 25:35
  You lose colors very slow.
• 25:36
  You don't notice it.
• 25:37
  Trying to tell somebody that they're ready for cataract surgery
• 25:40
  sometimes can be a hard thing because they're happy
• 25:42
  and you definitely don't want to operate on somebody's eye
• 25:45
  if they're happy with their vision.
• 25:46
  But on the other half, some things force it.
• 25:48
  You know, you're happy,
• 25:49
  but you're not going to pass your driver's test without restrictions.
• 25:52
  You know, so you kind of have to make a decision then.
• 25:54
  I've never heard about losing colors.
• 25:57
  Is that a rod cone thing?
• 25:59
  No, no, that's because the cataract is an accumulation
• 26:02
  of protein in your natural lens over time.
• 26:06
  So a cataract starts developing when you're born.
• 26:08
  The protein accumulates.
• 26:10
  And at some point, so much protein accumulates.
• 26:12
  It makes that clear lens cloudy.
• 26:14
  It also hardens the lens.
• 26:15
  So when you're born, the lens is like a gummy bear
• 26:18
  and you have muscles that attach to that.
• 26:20
  So a child can change the shape of their lens
• 26:23
  by 20, 30 diopters sometimes.
• 26:27
  So when you're young, you really don't need glasses.
• 26:29
  But as you age, the protein hardens the lens
• 26:32
  and now becomes more like a marble.
• 26:34
  And so your lens can't change a lot.
• 26:36
  And that's what puts you into reading glasses,
• 26:38
  because when you're young,
• 26:39
  you can change the whole from 20 feet out to near.
• 26:43
  But as you get older, that lens hardens
• 26:44
  and your vision starts to get frozen in one place.
• 26:47
  And that's called presbyopia.
• 26:48
  And that puts you into near glasses.
• 26:50
  But a cataract is a continuation of that process.
• 26:53
  So the lens starts to get cloudy
• 26:55
  and sometimes the cloudy can be white.
• 26:57
  It can look like snowflake.
• 26:58
  Sometimes it can be pseudochromic.
• 27:01
  It looks kind of like Christmas tree bulbs in it.
• 27:03
  Sometimes it can be yellow.
• 27:05
  And when it's yellow, that filters out
• 27:07
  just like putting a yellow lens in your glasses
• 27:09
  and it filters out reds and those kind of colors.
• 27:13
  You should be a doctor. Yeah, right.
• 27:15
  I learned more in the past three minutes
• 27:18
  than I think I've learned all year.
• 27:19
  Have you ever scuba dived?
• 27:20
  I held my breath underwater once.
• 27:22
  If you scuba dive, when you go down,
• 27:24
  that's kind of like the color loss with a cataract
• 27:26
  because the reds start looking brown.
• 27:28
  Each wavelength of color
• 27:29
  gets diffused out of water at a different rate.
• 27:32
  So you go down to 20 feet, you lose the reds,
• 27:34
  you go down deeper, you lose the next, you know.
• 27:36
  So that's kind of how I tried to a scuba diver.
• 27:40
  You're like, oh, yeah,
• 27:41
  because if you go to scuba diving,
• 27:42
  you bring a flashlight and shine that light on the coral.
• 27:45
  All of a sudden, it's bright red
• 27:46
  where you thought it was was like kind of a brownish.
• 27:49
  It must be a kick to work with an older patient.
• 27:51
  And then you tell them about this process
• 27:53
  and then you guide them through that process.
• 27:56
  And then they come out the other side
• 27:57
  and they open their eyes.
• 27:58
  And it's like that road to Damascus moment, maybe.
• 28:01
  That's what keeps me coming back.
• 28:03
  I mean, that's that that moment,
• 28:04
  that ah moment after cataract surgery.
• 28:06
  That's what makes ophthalmology
• 28:08
  probably the greatest profession, in my opinion.
• 28:10
  Do you get to do that ever for kids?
• 28:12
  Kids, you know, in the U.S.
• 28:15
  that you don't get those moments as much, you know,
• 28:18
  because we intervene with our health care
• 28:20
  before it gets that far, usually not all the time.
• 28:24
  But you go to countries like I do a lot of mission trips
• 28:26
  and these people are totally blind
• 28:29
  and the next day, you know, can see.
• 28:31
  And yeah, those moments are there.
• 28:34
  They're incredible.
• 28:34
  That must be cool.
• 28:35
  Yeah. And then the stories that come with those, you know.
• 28:37
  Tell me about those mission trips.
• 28:39
  I feel like that's probably a pretty important part of your story.
• 28:41
  That's probably other than my children and my wife, you know, family.
• 28:45
  That's probably the most enjoyable part of my life is going on mission trips.
• 28:49
  I mean, it's just so so rewarding personally for me.
• 28:52
  I went to Tulane and one of the doctors that I graduated, Dr.
• 28:57
  Ryan Rush, he was involved in some mission work in Mexico.
• 29:01
  And then he really started getting heavily involved
• 29:04
  and started his own mission group called Chosen.
• 29:07
  I would guess this was probably in 2010 or 11 that he formed this group.
• 29:12
  And initially, I believe, again, I'm not an expert on the whole part of it,
• 29:18
  but initially he was going to various locations in Mexico.
• 29:22
  And that's where I first joined him was on a mission trip in Mexico.
• 29:26
  And from there, he's expanded to five other locations.
• 29:30
  He's in Peru, Ghana, Congo, Nicaragua.
• 29:34
  And I've been to Mexico on the mission trip with Chosen.
• 29:38
  I kind of lose count and probably seven times maybe.
• 29:41
  And I've been to Nicaragua now three times
• 29:44
  and actually going in October for our fourth trip to Nicaragua.
• 29:49
  How has that shaped your overall passion for what you do?
• 29:52
  Well, you know, in the US, patients, the best way is feel entitled
• 29:57
  to their health care, entitled.