|Articles|March 18, 2016

Why it’s OK to be bossy

When I got out of school, I looked 15 years old. I had elderly patients leaving the practice so often, my employer actually framed my resume for people to read before they saw my face. I wore suits for the majority of my first 10 years in practice. I focused on children because they thought I was the babysitter.

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When I got out of school, I looked 15 years old. I had elderly patients leaving the practice so often, my employer actually framed my resume for people to read before they saw my face. I wore suits for the majority of my first 10 years in practice. I focused on children because they thought I was the babysitter. (How bad could I be? The light on my head was really cool.) 

I had an opinion on what was best for my patients, but back then I did not strongly voice that opinion. I was more concerned with not having patients leave. I had a checklist of diagnoses that I had to identify and treat without the help of a preceptor to be comfortable. I had the luxury of being an instructor at Indiana University School of Optometry, so that list went pretty quickly. Before long, I felt comfortable with patient care in my suit or long lab coat with a huge nametag identifying me as the doctor. I held my breath and counted to three every time I was asked, “When will the doctor see me?”  

More from Dr. Swartz: Why optometrists are awesome

Learning to sound like a boss lady

With experience comes comfort in one’s decisions and familiarity with clinical cases such that I firmly believed I was smarter than my non-eye doctor patients. Although I cannot say this about some of my engineering/physics brainiacs when discussing LASIK technology, I think we are all a step ahead of our patients despite their ability to Google symptoms on their iPhones. 

I remember when my patients stopped asking how old I was or how long I had been practicing, and started saying, “You look like you are in high school, but you sound like you are 35.” I stopped wearing suits. I reveled in my wrinkles, and learned to sound like the boss lady. Instead of my staff calling the police, I called them myself. Rather than asking for someone to be fired, I fired her.

With experience, we all think faster, assess the situation more calmly, and feel better equipped to be the boss. If I have a patient who is not taking his medication as prescribed or a parent failing to patching her child as I ordered, I feel confident in directing them. If a patient overwears his contact lenses or has a history of retinal degeneration and refuses dilation, I can maturely address his concerns. 

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