Abstract
Just as a sumo wrestler will not want to switch careers and become a sprinter athlete instead, ophthalmologists in other subspecialties must realize that life as a VR surgeon is quite different from what they are used to. Long and complicated surgeries, a lower success rate, and loss of sleep over the planning for, and failure of, a case are not uncommon and can easily overwhelm a VR surgeon who is not prepared for such a life. Conversely, a surgeon who accepts these difficulties and is able to consciously recharge his emotional batteries by the daily experience of restoring vision in conditions that not so long ago would inevitably have led to blindness, will have a highly gratifying professional life.
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Notes
- 1.
Even worse, their patients will be unhappy: a chronically unhappy surgeon is not able to perform.
- 2.
When I completed my fellowship with my initial mentor, the late Klaus Heimann, his farewell message was: “Don’t be discouraged, but your first 50 surgeries will end up as failures.”
- 3.
The typical phacologist.
- 4.
Similarly, an inexperienced VR surgeon should not, unless assisted by an experienced mentor, undertake removal of an EMP – I have seen eyes after such attempts with an intact EMP but with central retinal tears as the inexperienced surgeon grabbed retina instead of epiretinal tissue.
- 5.
I know of several fellows who entered into a program only to give up after a few months; more was lost for them than the time wasted.
- 6.
More precisely, surgeon of a person (see Chap. 5).
- 7.
Some, although not all, of these are therefore discussed in this book, even if such topics do not regularly get detailed in publications dedicated to VR surgery.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Kuhn, F. (2016). Should You Become a VR Surgeon?. In: Vitreoretinal Surgery: Strategies and Tactics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19479-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19479-0_1
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