Background

This is a blog that will be of little interest to most.

It is a self-serving blog.

It is a blog that will be updated sporadically at best.

It is a blog that will give little insight while striving to be eye opening.

My little slice of the internet will seek to educate but it will fail.

My little slice of the internet will seek to set falsehoods straight but instead it will reaffirm them.

My little slice of the internet will tell the story of two people who detest capitalism but wil try to open a business that makes money.

Not any old business.

No.

The business will be an optometric practice.

The business, the office, the store, the hope, the future will open in 6 months. Or 1 year. Or 2 or 10.

It will open when it opens. It will close when we go bankrupt.

Or when we die.

Or never.

First the characters in this horror story.

Swell is the most beautiful optometrist to ever grace the planet.

Good looking and smart. I married her because of the smart part only.

She, and I, graduated from Pacific University College of Optometry in May 2002. Over 5 years ago.

Can you believe it? I can’t.

Unbelievable.

We were married exactly one week after graduation.

One week to the day.

Swell is called Swell because I’m trying to maintain some semblance of privacy here, although with a little digging it would not be at all difficult to figure out who we are and where we live. C’est la vie. I don’t care if people know I wrote this although I don’t want them to google my proper name and come up with it.

Swell is also called Swell because she swells.

Literally.

She is stricken with a disease called Heriditary AnigoEdema (HAE). Learn this disease as you are sure to never meet someone with it.

It will, therefore, be on optometry boards.

Long story short Swell’s complement system is out of whack.

Unstoppable. Once started it runs amuck thereby causing uncontrolled swelling.

Anywhere and everywhere. It’s funny.

Except it could kill her.

But it won’t.

The FDA will soon approve treatment for HAE. Right FDA?

Swell has been a practicing optometrist since shortly after our honeymoon. She started working as an optometrist in a commercial practice in Washington State.

For $200 a day.

Yes. $200 a day.

She worked at this practice and others for 2 years. She worked primarily at a Wal-Mart and a Lenscrafters her first two years of practice.

Her pay went up.

Slightly.

Swell graduated with very little student loan debt. Her parents were/are very hard working and she is an only child. She owes $26,000 in total.

Hard working and Romanian. Swell immigrated to the USA when she was 9 and 3/4. She came for the freedom and stayed for the food.

My parents are also hard working. Very hard working. And Canadian.

I have 3 siblings.

And $150,000 in student loan debt.

That’s right. $150,000.

I immigrated to the USA when I was 22. I came for the optometry school and stayed for the girl.

When I started optometry school the Canadian dollar was about $0.65 of the American. I borrowed Canadian and paid American.

I’m earning American now and paying Canadian.

The Canadian dollar is equivalent to the American dollar.

In other words I got screwed.

I started working four months after graduation as I had to wait for my work permit. I too worked in Washington State. I worked at multiple Wal-Marts, a Lenscrafters, multiple private practices, a start-up commercial optical (that was bankrupt in less than a year), multiple Binyon’s (Eye Care Centers of America), the local optometry school, and a Sears.

My shortest commute during this time was probably 20 minutes from our apartment.

My longest?

2 hours.

One way.

All for the joy of saying I worked in a private practice.

And for the money.

Although the money wasn’t much.

It did allow me to drive my bus though. My 1970 VW Microbus.

That’s right. I’m a hippie trapped in an optometrist’s body. That has caused me a lot of trouble. But we don’t need to talk about that.

After two years of floundering in and around Washington state we picked up and moved to the Southeast USA so that I could get my MPH.

Our first day in our new city we had a job interview.

We went.

It was a commercial practice. We saw the sign that said $19 eye exams and said: “We don’t really want to do this do we? We’re too good for this aren’t we?”

The pay was almost double what we were making in Washington State.

We took it.

Swell for a year and a half, me for two and a half years.

Swell walked out of this job.

More than once.

It’s not what you dream of doing when you’re filling out your optometry school applications. Seeing a million walk-ins. Having the staff, the patients and your boss yell at you constantly. It’s not fun.

But it pays. And that’s what we were looking for.

Working part-time I was able to pay cash for my graduate school tuition.

It wasn’t cheap either.

For about a year I supplemented my income by going to inner city middle schools and doing basic refractive testing and dispensing free spectacles.

It was worse than doing the cheap commercial exams. But that’s a public health story not an optometry story.

I graduated with my degree. Swell found a new job. Seeing a few patients a day and selling glasses the rest of the day. That’s right. Despite being a “doctor” she was expected at this new job to pre-test patients, check insurance, sell glasses and to be grateful she was “allowed” to work at all.

Lesson: Other optometrists don’t like you. They don’t play nice. And they want to take advantage of you.

Especially if you’re a woman.

And cute.

There is more to this story but it’s not worth rehashing. So I won’t.

You might ask: “Why didn’t you two go into private practice right out of school? Why would you stoop to working commercial optometry for the first four years out of school? You are sell outs. Lazy. Rotten good for nothing losers who do nothing but make a mockery of the rest of us great and talented optometrists. You should be beaten within a diopter of your life with a Maddox rod.”

My answer? “Calm down. Secondly we didn’t want to.”

Easy enough answer.

We didn’t want to. We didn’t know what area of the country we wanted to live in let alone what city. We didn’t have any optometric business skills let alone the guts to open a practice. We didn’t come across a practice worth buying in our, admittedly, short look. And we were happy to work for someone else. We were content with being employees – although we were independent contractors for the most part. We were newly married and optometry was neither our first nor second love in life.

It was our job.

I suppose our career but we were too carefree to know the difference.

Or to care.

I graduated with my masters degree in May, 2006. In January 2007 we found ourselves teaching optometry to Palestinian optometry students in Nablus, West Bank.

It was great.

It was fun.

It was rewarding.

It didn’t pay enough.

Or else we’d still be there.

While there I helped write a paper that will be published in the November 2007 edition of Clinical and Experimental Optometry. I also wrote and submitted another paper that is under second review for the Journal of Optometry.

Both Swell and I are published optometrists. She is co-author of a paper that was published in the Behavioral Optometry Journal a few years ago.

Both published.

Both commercial optometrists.

A dichotomy of sorts.

We came back to the Southeast USA after our time in Palestine, and Egypt, and South Africa (A presentation I wrote was accepted to be presented at a conference in Durban), and Romania.

We came back and found commercial optometry jobs.

Again.

After many tears of frustration Swell has decided that this is not the place for us.

I couldn’t agree more.

We need to leave this part of the country.

And fast.

But leave for what? The overly saturated Pacific Northwest where you make nothing as an employed optometrist?

Canada?

That is a good question.

We’ll soon see. I can tell you this though. We will not move unless we have a practice to move to. We’re tired of working for someone else.

Note I didn’t say we’re tired of commercial optometry.

We’re simply tired of being told what to do and how to do it.

Commercial optometry afforded us many opportunities that a private practice would not.

We’ve seen the world.

Literally.

We’ve made money. We’ve been free to up and quit our jobs without any feelings of guilt.

We’ve told our employers: “You know what? I’m not coming to work next month and if you want to fire me I don’t care.”

And we did. And they did. And we didn’t care.

I was able to get more edumacation.

And I loved it.

So we will buy or open a practice.

Soon.

When we find one.

On Thursday I have a phone meeting with a well-known optometric consulting group who will outline the program they have to help business idiots (me) learn how to run a business. We will then start looking – hard – for a practice to buy as we need the cash flow. If we can’t find one within a year or so we will open cold.

And starve.

Our lives are not optometry.

Our lives are others. Optometry is merely a tool we can use to serve them.

Our patients.

And the world at large.

My time in optometry is coming to a close but I will help Swell run her practice as I pursue other (public health) interests.

Join us on our journey from employed commercial optometrists to practice owners who hate money but need to make it.

It will be a wild ride.