My name is Son Ho.
I am an ophthalmologist working at the VA here in Orlando.
On a day-to-day basis I see our veteran patients and I will treat them for their eye disease.
I also have a subspecialty in [inaudible] plastics where that involves doing surgery
around the eyelids and around the orbit as well.
The most common things that I see lately patient having problems
such as cataracts, glaucoma, macro generation.
These are the big three disease pathologies that affect our veterans.
So the first thing I do when patients come in is just have a nice conversation and kind
of understand the background on what's been going on and how this problem has occurred.
Once I get enough of the history and I get
to know the patient a little bit I will perform a full examination.
So the most important we use is a slit lamp.
So that's just basically a microscope that we're maneuver
and take very magnified view of the eye.
And then we take look at the front half, the back half, and then we, you know,
we dilate your eyes and then we actually take a look
into the back to the retina, the optic nerve.
And that's also fascinating because that's, you know, where we would look into your organ.
We see blood vessels running through.
If you can even zoom in you can see actual individual blood cells running along the vessels
along the eye.
And usually we should be able to kinda figure out what's going on,
and this is purely something in front of the eye.
If, let's say they have issues for the back we'll have to take some pictures,
some scans that can measure how thick certain, you know, parts of the eye are.
Like the macula and that helps with diagnostics.
It's pretty easy with, you know, eyelid surgery.
You kinda typically what you'd expect.
You know, scalpel, scissors, they're just very small.
[laughs] And then on the cataract side we have to use a microscope
and actually operate, so that's kinda neat.
And, you know, we have to use your hands and use your feet,
because your feet moves the microscope and turns the Phaco Machine on, which is the machine
that kinda breaks the cataract up.
And then with our hands, we manipulate around the eye.
So typical day always as you expect starts early.
Our cases usually start around 7:30, so usually I'm in the hospital around 6:30, 7:00,
making sure everything's okay, seeing our patients and then
on average I'll do about six to seven cases day.