Clear Visions: Dr. Tyrone McCall's Path to Ophthalmology

You're doing the surgery, and while you're doing it, you're thinking, what am I gonna have for lunch today? And what else do I have to. I got some errands to run and everything. Next thing you know, you're done with the surgery.

Well, I hope you weren't thinking about that stuff when you were operating on my eye.

Focus on your eye.

Hi, everybody. This is Generations MD my name is Stephanie, and this is Dr. Sarah Davis, my mother. And we're joined here today with Dr. Ty McCall.

And Dr. McCall is an esteemed ophthalmologist here in Dallas, and we're really excited to talk to him and find out more about his path and how he enjoys ophthalmology.

Yay.

Happy to be here.

Welcome.

Thank you.

We didn't really give you a brief when you walked in, but we're just diving right in.

We were going cold. I like it.

It'll always be recording.

That's right.

But I don't know if, you know, we've been kind of interviewing different doctors of different specialties, just kind of hearing about their path and, like, how they got to where they are. And then, you know, if you like what you're doing and kind of just like to hear, especially from people who have been in practice for a long time, just looking back, reflecting on, like, this long path coming from somebody who's about to start this whole journey.

I'll give you the bullet summary so you'll get used to. You'll get used to your soap note. You got to distill a lot of information.

Yeah.

Very quickly. So grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Went to Tulsa Memorial High School. Went to University of Oklahoma for college. University of Oklahoma for medical school.

Go Sooners.

Yes. I did my intern year down at Baylor, downtown Dallas, Big Baylor. Did my ophthalmology residency at University of Arkansas in Little Rock. Did a cornea and refractive surgery fellowship at Stenski Eye Institute in Santa Monica, California.

Oh, okay. I was thinking it was ucla, but is that affiliate down the street?

Not affiliated down the street in Santa Monica. And then I joined the current practice I'm in in 2002. Cornea Associates of Texas. Been there for 22 years now.

Nice. That's when I had my LASIK surgery. There was, like, 2002, I think. So. Just saying. It wasn't by you, but it was by one of your partners.

Very good.

But Dr. McCall did just operate on my cataract just a month ago, and as you can all see, it's doing well. He did an excellent Job.

And then I had the opportunity to shadow you in the or, and that was awesome. I wrote about that in my applications, and I was just like, it. So cool. And Dr. Bukhall let me squirt the water when I was there, and, like, it was. And you're just like, bam, bam, bam. And you got your whole spiel. And, like, it was just. It was really. It was a really cool experience for me. And I know you do that every.

Day, but, yeah, we're lucky. We have a phenomenal team in our surgery center. And it's kind of like dancing. You learn the dance moves, and once you learn the dance moves, then you're not thinking about the moves anymore. You're just thinking about doing the best you can. And one of my mentors, he called it analysis. Perception. Feel. So analysis. You just gotta learn the steps. You gotta learn, Okay, I put my hand here, my right foot on the pedal, does this. You just gotta learn. You gotta know what you're doing. Perception is you know what you're doing. Then you say, okay, well, now that I do this, how can I sequence this together in a better way to be more efficient? And then the feel is. Is you're doing the surgery, and while you're doing it, you're thinking, what am I gonna have for lunch today? And what else do I have to. I got some errands to run and everything, and next thing you know, you're done with the surgery.

Well, I hope you weren't thinking about that stuff when you were operating on my eye.

Focus on you a little bit.

Yeah, well, I think my operation took, like, less than five minutes or something like that.

About six to seven minutes.

Okay. Yeah. He was like, yeah. I was like, okay.

But as you'll attest, and whether it's athletics or that's the only one I kind of think of. Off the top of your head is they call about being in the zone, is you're literally not thinking about anything. You're merely reacting. So as you start your career and you start doing things where you think, you start an iv. Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? But if you watch the nurses, particularly do the IVs really well, they're really not thinking about it. Tourniquet goes on, see the vein slide right in, pull it out. I mean, so it's just. It's very fluid. So when you start thinking about what you're doing, you become less fluid. But if you have practiced enough and done enough, you feel more fluid with it.

Yeah. My immediate thought goes to just, like, doing cheerleading and, like, doing, like, tumbling or, like, gymnastic stuff. And it's just like, you don't have to think about doing a flip anymore. At first you're like, okay, how do.

I do a flip?

But then it's just like, yeah, just do it. I don't know.

Identical analysis, perception, feel. You don't think anymore. You just do the act.

Yeah. Growing up, like, just backing way up. Did you think that you were gonna go into medicine?

So one of my best friends in life. His name is Carl Sylvester. He's an ophthalmologist in Oklahoma City. Known him since first grade. He's literally the first kid I met when I went to first grade, Moved from New Jersey to Oklahoma, and so walk into first grade class, and he's sitting across the table. And as we grew up together, talked about medicine, and in high school, we were idiots, and we said, we're gonna be ophthalmologists. Well, had you asked us what an ophthalmologist does, we would have said, they make Gl. He had no idea and went on to college, medical school. And lo and behold, he and I went to medical school together and was like, kind of like this. So I did rotations and said, okay, we're gonna do this. So both he and his wife are ophthalmologists.

Oh, wow.

He did his fellowship at the same place I did, a year ahead of me. So we kind of follow each other along. So it's been fun to have one of my best friends in life, also a professional colleague. And we joke because my wife's an attorney, but my buddy Carl and his wife, Dean, are both ophthalmologists. When we get together, my wife's like, yeah, boring. We're going to talk shop all night. We just can't help but do it. We try not to, but it comes natural. We just want to talk about that.

Yeah, I mean, backing up, like, for people who don't know what ophthalmology is, like, what is that? And then what is your specialty within that field?

Ophthalmology is a medical degree. So four years of college, four years of medical school, intern year, three years of residency. You can do additional fellowship training. I did an additional year. And then basically, you're out practicing. Ophthalmology is eye care, both medical and surgical. That includes every disease of the eye. There's about a dozen different specialties of the eyeball alone. It's kind of hard to imagine that this one little space right here can encompass so much specialization, but it is so I'm a cornea and cataract specialist, so I specialize in what's called the anterior segment, and it's mostly stuff around the eyelids, the cornea, iris, and the lens. Retina doctors, they live mostly in what's called the posterior segment. So they're the ones that do things like diabetic retinopathy, retinal detachment. Glaucoma is also in the back of the eye. God bless the retina and glaucoma doctors. But I have no desire to do any of that just because it's outside my wheelhouse.

Yeah, yeah.

Just the front of the eye.

Only the front of the eye. Don't ask him anything about the back of the eye. That is just. That is way far away from where he's dealing.

Well, also, I remember. Cause I. I grew up with your daughter Tyler. And I remember as a kid being like, oh, well, Tyler's dad is a doctor. And then I just remember being like, oh, well, I'm sick. Like, maybe I can ask, like, Tyler's dad about it. And then my parents being like, no, you can't. If you're sick, you can't go to Tyler's dad. And I was like, well, I don't understand. He's a doctor. That just didn't make sense. I just. I didn't understand that you're a doctor, but I'm sick, and you can't help me.

I'm gonna give you a chuckle because I think about when y' all were young and the die was cast for Tyler and Matthew, that medicine was not their thing. When we did the cow heart dissection in second grade, they did not like that.

I remember Tyler getting pretty queasy.

I had to leave the room.

Yeah. Yeah.

All right.

Okay. This is not gonna be her thing.

Yeah, no, I remember that. And you were excited about it.

Here we go.

I don't know why they brought second graders to do that, though. We didn't know what was going on.

But I don't know. See, Worked out for you, I guess.

I don't know if that was the pivot for me, but.

Well, the. I mean, I guess I wanted. Well, I don't know if you want to go more for the past, but I was, like, going into the present now. I mean, for our listeners, ophthalmology is an incredibly competitive specialty to match in. It might be the most competitive. You know, I don't know. It's like that in neurosurgery over the years.

It's historically probably been neurosurgery derm, orthopedics and ophthalmology.

Yeah, and ophthalmology. I mean, because each program only takes like how many people per year?

I think most programs probably take three. Some of the larger programs take upwards of eight, sometimes maybe even 10. But it's been so long. But I'm not familiar with anything more than 10.

Right. So I mean, you know, contrast that with an internal medicine program that even a smaller program takes at least 40, you know, could be 60, 80, I mean, each year. So it's really, it's very, very selective. So in order to be an ophthalmologist, you've got to make sure you got all the stuff right. You've got good grades and test scores. And now I guess you have to have research. You know, you've got to do research. I don't know if you had to do that when you were in med school, that wasn't such a popular thing then.

So I finished Medical School in 1996 and a little bit of a different environment. It's much more competitive now. I had a great time in college, I had a great time in medical school. But if I as I back and towards the end of my medical school career, I was part of the student liaison for the admissions office. So they wanted current students to help interview prospective students. And I knew what was coming through paper wise. And I realized had I not gotten in the year I got in, probably wouldn't have gotten in.

Yeah, yeah.

And to your point, it is competitive, but I also have an inherent bias. I went to a public high school, a state college. I mean, I had a chemistry degree, but I wasn't in the top 1% of my class. Had a great time in college, but I always knew I could do it. That was kind of my mentality. And of course I probably had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder once I got in. And then as you take your USMLE step one, step two, step three, and then there's something called ocap Ophthalmic Knowledge Assessment Program. So it's kind of like the ophthalmology USMLE Ophthalmology boards. And once I got into it, I was like, I really know how to do this. And although my GPA may not have reflected it gilded on the OCAP, I mean I wasn't top 1%, so I knew I could do it. But this is not unique to medicine is. There's plenty of people that may not necessarily have the paper who could actually do it. And there are plenty of people who have the paper who have no business doing it.

Yeah, for sure that's true.

I mean, especially when you talk about procedural skills. Right. I mean, you can have all the knowledge in the world, but if you're not good with your hands on that little tiny eyeball, you're not the person I want working on my eyeball.

They are better about. My understanding is they're better about that. Now as far as tactile sense and skills and utilizing micro instruments, because you get someone that's really smart, they blow it out. Gpa, great test scores and they've got a tremor. I mean, they literally can't do the thing they need to do. And so they'll wash out very quickly. But then that takes a spot from someone who respectively might have otherwise done reasonably well.

Yeah, such a life. Yeah, but so, okay, so you're saying it wasn't like you just studied, studied, studied in med school, you still, you had a well rounded med school, you know, education.

I loved it. I had a great time. But it was a, I loved it different than college just because at that point, not that I didn't think college was important, but you go into college and you're 18 and kind of a moron. And so at least I knew I kind of had an end goal in mind of getting to medical school. But then once I got in medical school, then that focus became sharper, but I was still 22 years old. And so definitely a maturation process. But I had a lot of fun, it was a great time. Having a lot of friends from OU that went there, having my best friend in life, Carl, be there. So it was a, for me, it was an easy, easier social transition. And it wasn't one where I just had to leave behind this social life and become just books. I studied a lot more. I can't remember if they said this when you were going through that. I think the first two years each semester is equivalent to taking 30 semester hours. I kind of vaguely recall that. Sounds about right. You think an 18 hour semester load is heavy, You've got to knuckle down. So I definitely studied a lot more, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

Yeah, but you're also at a place in your life where that's okay. You know, I mean, you're not, you're.

Not going out Monday, Wednesday, every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Right, right. Yeah.

And you're surrounded by all these people who are doing the same thing that you are as well. You know, everybody's, everybody's studying hard. And so, you know, it's and, you know, and everybody's focused and, you know, you're finally there where you want it to be, where you worked hard to be. And so I think that that's, you know, that's appropriate. But I think that there, I mean, Stephanie and I have talked about this a lot on the podcast of, like, people who, you know, go to med school. And then it's just like, okay, I'm gonna have no life. I'm just gonna study, study, study. And, I mean, I don't think those people are going to be great doctors.

We talked a little bit a second ago about the microsurgical skills. Clearly important. You got to have a fund of knowledge. But after 20 plus years, I think you and I will both attest that the key thing to being a good doctor is being able to communicate and be empathetic with your patient. Literally letting someone know you care about them, not that you're caring for them. You care about them. That's all your patient care about you. I mean, you've seen the studies where what does a patient think is most important? Your pedigree is not on the top five. Maybe. I don't know. It's not top two or three. Does that person sitting across from me care for me? So you got to have the fund of knowledge. So I say there's two things you got to do to be good at anything you do in life. Doesn't matter what it is. You got to be competent, and you got to care. You can be the most brilliant person, but if you're a jerk, that's no good. And you can be the most loving, compassionate person in the world, but if you're a moron, that's no good either. You got to be competent, but you got to care about what you're doing.

Yeah, no, that's all that. I like that a lot.

Yeah.

You talk about knowing, like, the whole time that you knew you could do it. I feel like people talk about now a lot about imposter syndrome and going into medical school just surrounded by so many people who are also really high achievers. Have you just always been like that or how did you not fall into kind of that group of people who had that sort of imposter syndrome.

If anyone tells you young or old that they don't have imposter syndrome, they are a liar.

You say that.

I don't know. I'm not saying, like. Okay, I think everybody has those feelings at times.

At times, yes.

I don't feel that the majority of the time. I would say so.

Imposter syndrome, to me, great way to summarize it. Everyone has it to some degree. I don't spend every day thinking, do I not know this? In my area of expertise, I have a really deep fund of knowledge, but it's super narrow. So, sure, someone comes in with a condition that is outside my wheelhouse, they've got some anomalous optic nerve or something going on the retina, something in the.

Back of the eye, right?

And they put me on the spot. And I feel much more comfortable now saying, I don't know, but I know to get you to. But early in your career, particularly when you're a young physician, saying I don't know is really tough because it basically admits that you don't know everything. And of course you don't know everything. But when you're young, you have to put forth this air of expertise and authority. And by saying, I don't know, you're kind of putting it out there that you really don't know. And so to me, the imposter syndrome is there are days where I'll see a case. I'm like, should I know what that is? I'll go look it up. I'm like, maybe I've seen that before. So there are times where I'll have a diagnostic. Maybe I should have known that. There are some days I like to run, and some days I've got good legs, and some days I got dead legs. And it's not something I've done right or wrong. And in the past where I thought, I'm gonna power through the dead leg day, now I just turn around and walk a little bit or go home. You say, well, what's that gotta do with imposter syndrome? There are days where I'm in the surgical sink scrubbing, and I know I got some tough cases coming. And in my mind I'm thinking, do you have it today?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, once you get in that room, and I think this is where the compartmentalization, not only in medicine, but just kind of life is in that moment. You may be thinking those things, but once I walk in the room, gloves go on, sit down, get in the microscope, you focus. And again, I go back to athletics, or I use the example of a pilot or something. In that moment, maybe there's some weather coming in, or you're flying somewhere you haven't been before, and you kind of have the moment of, what am I going to do here? But your instincts take over the analysis, perception, feel. Instead of that, what am I doing? I know what I'm doing. It's just, how am I going to feel that while I'm doing it? Perhaps that's what kind of leads to some of that hesitancy. Or an athlete. I can remember there was someone who said, maybe it was a football player. But before every game, literally before every game, they threw up.

Oh, gosh.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah.

And they're professionals and just, I mean, they're doing this every week, but right before the game they get geared up and hurl and okay, let's go. But you would never know that, right?

Well, and I think that that's, I think that that's all important and maybe that's kind of a benefit of whatever you want to call it, imposter syndrome or whatever, but never letting your ego get so big that you're just like, oh, yeah, I got this. I know it all. I think that that is like the death of anybody in any career, especially in medicine. When you see those people that are really overconfident or when they get really ground into a diagnosis, they're like, okay, I saw this patient and I was pretty sure that they had this. Well, then some other information comes up and all of a sudden it's like, oh, actually it did look like it at that time, but now we have more information. Now I know that that's not the case. And you'll see people that just, they're like, no, no, it was that. I know it was that. And all of a sudden they're trying to prove that it was rather than expanding their mind and saying, oh, you know what? I could have been wrong. Now I have more information, but that person who just thinks that they can't be wrong is not a good physician.

I feel fortunate that I have eight other great partners. If you'd asked me a long time ago, I thought I didn't want to be in solo practice. Having been now in a group practice. I know I'm much better as a physician because this is what we tell all our new hires. And I've said along, I've been in a 22 year fellowship. It's awesome. My partners have a. Because it's. I get to crowdsource every day with eight other experts who are smarter than I am. So it's been great. And having a surgical mentor where I got a tough case and hey, can you scrub in with me? Sure.

Yeah.

So having that and you're doing surgery with two hands and you got your feet, like being a drummer. Two hands. Two feet. But to have those extra Two hands in there. It makes the surgery, any potential complicated surgery, much easier.

Well, not being afraid to ask for.

Help when you need it, that's great.

It's a good quality.

How did you end up in this group and how did that bring you to Dallas?

So I did my intern year at Baylor, and two of the months you do a rotation elective, and one of them I did with ophthalmology and at the time, Mike Milner, who's still in practice. Mike is a general ophthalmologist. Awesome guy. He went to Baylor and he was really good friends with Brad Bowman, who is in my practice now. And so when I rotated with Mike, I was doing my intern year. So I was going off ophthalmology and I told him I was interested in cornea. I didn't know, but I was going to kind of test out, test the waters in training. But he said, well, if you know kind of where you're headed, if you're interested in cornea, just let me know. So coming towards the end of residency, it's like I was really interested in cornea. I had a wonderful mentor, Mike Brown at University of Arkansas. I attribute my career to him because he's the one that got me interested in it. He loved it. He was smart and a smart ass and phenomenal surgeon and just, he was, he was a great mentor. So when I was interested in it, I called Mike up and said, hey, I think I'm gonna do this. So he put me in touch with Brad and had a few meetings and got the job.

And then you stayed?

Yeah.

That's great.

And I don't know if you have friends like this, but you have your cohort through residency, whether it's your same group or a few years above or below. And I've been practicing for three or four years and I kind of keep up with a few of my friends and they're bouncing around to their second, third and fourth practice. Like, that's kind of weird. And you just realize when you're pretty fortunate that you find a group you want to stay with that just the B.S. you got to put up with sometimes in practice. As a young physician, you come out, you don't really know. I didn't have to deal with that. I had awesome senior partners who took care of us. It was an all boats rise. It wasn't this competitive nature. Eat what you kill. I mean, my success was their success, so I couldn't have asked for more.

That's great. That seems like a positive environment to be a part of.

Well, and so how do you like actually your day to day life as an ophthalmologist? I have, you know, been in your office before and like we talked about, it's a very busy, buzzy place. But like, I feel like you might say the same thing a lot of different times during the day. I was on my way out from seeing you and I heard you saying something to somebody. I was like, I think I've heard that.

I'm not familiar with any other aspects of medicine, so I don't really know this, but I gotta believe almost every other discipline in medicine kind of has the same rhythms, if you will. There's a lot of things we see fairly routine. As a cornea specialist, we see a ton of dry eye. So dry eye for us is probably the tinnitus for ent world, the low back pain for the orthopod or the back pain, foot problems. But there's various things. That's what a lot of people have. And what's frustrating about dry eye is you can't cure it, you can treat it. So I always tell patients, think of this like arthritis, we're going to get you better, we're going to elevate the functioning baseline. But I can't cure this. And so that's kind of the frustrating thing. We see that a lot of and almost everybody has some degree of dry eye, particularly as we all progress through life, the water tank goes down and so we just get drier. And if anyone is watching this, they'll laugh because I say almost those exact same words about 30 times a day, literally. I give that spiel about 30 times a day. So I throw that in there flippantly.

Reminded me I'm supposed to be using my eye drops.

But the other thing I love about it is it's busy. But we're, no pun intended, we're focused, we're right here. So God bless you. And you got to talk to someone who has copd, congestive heart failure, diabetes, a multitude of issues. And not that I don't care about those things, but I literally can't do anything for those people, for those. So when someone starts saying, well Doc, you know, this is like, well, love to help you, but we're right here, we're right here.

It's like me when I was a kid. Dr. McCall can't help me.

I'm saying, so clinic is busy, but it can be fairly efficient. The other thing I love is that we get to use a lot of technology. That's a double edged sword because Technology can be very expensive, and you don't lean too much on technology. But nevertheless, it's a lot of fun to be able to have something that diagnostic. The other thing I love about the cornea is, I mean, there's a few tests that we need to do, but for the most part, what you see is what you get. So I can kind of look at things. And so my diagnosis and assessment part doesn't take a long time. I mean, I might have to do some other tests, but generally, whatever the problem is, I can kind of see it, and then I can either do something about it or I can't. That's the other thing I love about it, is we're in an interventional discipline, but I can fix a lot of things. I don't manage a lot of things. I fix a lot of things.

Yeah, that's nice.

And the other thing, particular with cataract surgery is these lens implants will last as long as the patient does. So we're used to planned obsolescence. Gonna get a new microphone, new computer, new camera, new phone. These lenses will last forever.

Nice.

It was kind of nice to be able to fix a problem and say you're good.

That's not as good for business, though. You want people to keep coming back.

So that's where the baby boomers come in. So you were talking earlier about residential. These spots. We've, as a guild, we've engineered a shortage. Now, we were. We were. We were fortunate that we came in at the time as the baby boomers exploded. So it was a perfect storm of supply and demand. But the problem is, as the guild, the medical board, we're not increasing spots. We need to have a massive amount increase of medical student slots, but we're not doing that now. Perhaps this problem solves itself because as the baby boomer cohort starts going away and it won't be as much of a demand, but nevertheless, we're going to really slog through the next 15 years with a disproportionate demand and supply. They're just not enough doctors to take care of the patients.

So you've seen that in your practice. Yeah.

Can't keep up.

Yeah.

Wow.

I could work seven days a week, 10 hours a day, and probably not still keep up.

Wow.

So what stops you from doing that? Just going on to, like. I mean, if you could work so much, do you feel like you're a person that is.

Wants.

I feel like we see this a lot just with the type of people that go into medicine, just want to Work so hard, just doing the most that they can. Or have you been able to kind of find a balance in your life.

A work in progress? You know the statistics better than I do. But medicine has twice the suicide rate, three times the alcohol rate, three times the divorce rate. You pick your societal ill, whatever that may be, and that number is 2.3x in medicine because it's really stressful. And so from a financial standpoint, sure, you work harder. It's great. But that comes at an absolute cost. And so when I was younger and productivity was so important, yeah, I cranked it out. But I knew there were days I came home and I was not a good dad and husband and friend and. And you see that enough. You're like, I don't like who this person is. Doesn't matter what the dollar signs are. I don't like who this person is. So having gone through a little bit of a burnout many years ago, I knew it was time to dial it back, and I don't regret it at all.

How have you dialed it back?

Just fewer. There was a time where it was a badge of honor to see how many cases I could do. Could I crank out 25 cases today? There are people that do even more. Could I crank out more and more? As you know, you get on that hedonic treadmill and you're like, I'm gonna run. And now I'm running fast. Now I need to run faster. Running faster. I need to run faster. And at some point you just say, like, what's the point? Right? Some of the times I've talked to some of my partners about this is. And the younger ones, I get it. So they have houses and gotta save up for education for their kids or whatever it may be. The way I look at it is right now, at least for me, if I want to see a lot more patients, I want to work a lot harder five days a week, cram them all in there. I'm only doing it for one of two reasons. One is I want to make more money. Or the second is I have this dying, burning urge to take care of humanity as much as I can. Well, neither one of those are realistic, right? It doesn't matter how hard I work. You can't take care of all of them. And having more money, okay, what are.

You going to do now? You have all the things that you.

Then you can't spend it because you're working.

So it is a work in progress to find that balance. Finding that third space, I think is really important. Home work, and then finding a third.

Space, Lakewood Country Club.

And I would say golf is my main outdoor outlet, but for me, I would just say outdoor. I like to run, I like to play golf. If you said we can watch a basketball game on TV or we go shoot hoot in the driveway, let's go shoot hoot. So if you give me the alternative, I'd rather be doing something outside. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to sit on the couch and relax a little bit, but just finding that third space as an outlet.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Do you feel like you, I mean, I know it's important to you, wouldn't be able to get to where you are now without having had that grind, but is there any points in your life that you regret, like just working too hard and wish that you would have taken a step back, or do you think you wouldn't be where you are today without it?

There's no way to know.

Yeah, yeah, there's really no way to.

Know because ultimately you don't get a do over. So I don't know. I don't know. Had I had a little bit more of a laid back approach early in my educational and professional career, would I be more hungry now and want to work more? What I. I don't know. All I know is what I did, but I don't regret it. Going back to college and medical school and early practice ophthalmology, I think is geared towards that. We do take call within our practice, but when there's. When I joined, there was only four of us, but now there's nine of us. So taking call, it's not that onerous. We basically take call for the practice. I remember when I was in my intern year, you're on call every third night. You're sleeping in the hospital, you're on call, you're admitting all night long and then you got to work the next day. So in ophthalmology, I'm in my bed and I may have to take some phone calls, but I'm not wiped out for the next day. So ophthalmology itself I think is suitable for a. It's one of the more suitable disciplines for a better work life balance.

You said in first grade that you said that you wanted to go into ophthalmology, but did you consider other specialties? And like, I mean, it sounds like you like what you do, but are you like, are you glad that you went to the specialty that you did?

Very much so. Again, it's one of those things where can I tell you my exact frame of thought in high school and college? Probably not, but I just knew as I was a chemistry major so I like science, so enjoyed that a lot. I took a handful of business classes. I took like a torts class for law and it was interesting, just didn't do anything for me. And some of my buddies that were in the business school or pre law, I saw what they were doing and we talked, but it just didn't do anything for me.

Just married a lawyer instead.

Filled that jones right there. And so as I got further and further along and realized I actually kind of like this in my senior year, somewhere between my junior and senior year, I worked in a chemistry lab as part of my degree. Great mentor, Daniel Ventofer. Anyway, great guy and he's like Tyrone, you should be a chemist. I was like not happen. It was fun. We synthesized a new organic compound. It's kind of cool. I spent that summer in event hood and titrating stuff and distilling and so it was interesting if you will. But I was like no, the day to day.

Yeah, not so much.

So as I will say, I came to medicine kind of by default but I kind of had an interest in it to begin with.

Yeah, yeah. In regards to like then choosing residency specialty though, did you consider other specialties in regards to that?

I thought neurology was super cool. Neurologists can't fix things. Yeah, they can diagnose and they're great detectives, but then they're like you had a stroke, you're paralyzed right now. If you're an interventionalist, different story. But from a diagnostic standpoint I thought it was fascinating, but I kind of want to be able to do stuff and fix stuff. I was interested in orthopedics and neurosurgery. I like the delicate nature of neurosurgery, I like the fixing things of orthopedics and I like the lifestyle. Yeah, they make great salaries, but yeah, not worth it.

So we asked this to everyone going back, would you still pick the same specialty?

100%.

Nice, nice. There you go.

Do you think you will practice for a while more or remains to be seen?

Great question. For whatever reason, kind of talking about wanting to be an ophthalmologist in grade school. Didn't know what it meant. I've always thought in my mind when I first started 30 years, I don't know why 30 years seemed appropriate. So that's eight years my senior. The doctor started the practice. Dr. Gallander. He retired in 20, 2074. Phenomenal surgical skills.

Phenomenal.

And so, actually, I talked to one of My other partners, Dr. Alexander, and I told her, as I read about this, where a surgeon had said later in his career he wanted his other partners watching, basically auditing his surgeries and giving critical feedback of, you still got it or you sure? So I've told her over time, I mean, I still feel like I can do it very well, but over time, if I ever thought to myself that surgery seemed tougher than I thought it should be or just, are my outcomes. I track all my outcomes. Are my outcomes. Not like, what's going on. I want someone looking, watching my surgery and saying, you're fine. That was an anomaly. Or we need to talk about how do you feel? And kind of flesh that out. So 30 years. So eight years.

So that's eight years. Okay. All right, great. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, we really appreciate it.

It's the time to come over here. I mean, you could have done, like, you know, 20 surgeries this time.

Sometimes you gotta cut it off.

That's so true. Thanks for listening, guys. You can follow us on TikTok at Generation 70, on Instagram @ParkCities, PersonalPhysicians. And do you have anything you need to plug? If you have a cataract, then go hit up doctor time a call. So fair enough. And we will talk to you next week. Bye.

Bye.