This continuing series features a 4^th year SCCO student, Daniel Brinchman, who is off to his first rotation in Lawton, Oklahoma at the Lawton IHS Hospital optometry clinic.

Here’s Episode #2:

by Daniel Brinchman, 4th year SCCO student  

See what kind of weird stuff shows up when you get bored and start Googling things?  I am referring to this photo:

I pondered what I could possibly do with this gem of a picture and realized it was too odd to put on Facebook but just the right amount of odd to make it to the blog about the first state I was rotating through, Oklahoma.

Friend, I have learned some keys to survival if you should ever take a wrong turn on 3 or 4 consecutive highways and wind up in the frying pan of the United States:

• Shorten all of your words that end in “ing” to “in” (as in runnin’, eatin’, or dephosphorylatin’).
• Either say yes, or be prepared to feel ostracized when you order your corn on the cob NOT rolled in butter.
• If you think you see a mudcrab on the side of the road, it’s probably a spider; a pre-historically sized spider. Exert caution.

A photo I snapped: a view of one of the many summer storms that rips across the middle of the country every year…

A good case I encountered in clinic will help you understand precisely what giving eye exams in this state is like.  A 42-year-old male patient presents with chief complaint of blurred vision, dry eyes, and headaches.  Standard case history procedure revealed differential diagnoses and my plan of action for blur and dryness.  Next up, the headaches.

“Sir, please tell me a little more about your headaches.”

“They hurt real bad.”

“Okay, how long have you had these headaches for?”

“Oh prolly the past 14 months.”

“14 months? That’s very exact.”

“Well yeah I’m thinkin’ they started right after I was gored in the side by my Longhorn steer.”

A reenactment of the moments leading up to the goring…

There’s an old cliché saying: you learn somethin’ new every day. Buried deep in the center of this great country, clad in a white coat brandishing nothing but bottles of dilatin’ drops, I learn somethin’ new every patient.

-Daniel Brinchman, SCCO Class of 2014