The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hey, Doc! What’s Wrong with My Eye?: A General Guide to Eye Symptoms by John C Barber

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Hey, Doc! What’s Wrong with My Eye?: A General Guide to Eye Symptoms by John C Barber https://www.amazon.com/Hey-Doc-Whats-Wrong-Eye/dp/1543429319 Johncbarber.com This book is a primer on eye d...isease. It is written for the nonphysician but would benefit physicians and paramedical personnel who are not eye physicians. Dr. Barber explains the common signs and symptoms of eye diseases and explains the usual treatments for these diseases, including glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration, and strabismus. It contains chapters about the ways diabetes, thyroid disease, AIDS, and other systemic diseases affect the eye. Several chapters explain the surgery for correction of cataracts, retinal detachment, crooked eyes, and glaucoma. There is a section on eye diseases of childhood. This book is recommended for employees in ophthalmic offices to better understand patient problems and the doctor's treatments.Author John C. Barber, MD, author of several books related to the practice of medicine. DR. BARBER spent a career in academic ophthalmology. During his fellowship in corneal diseases at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston, he began working with corneal prostheses. He has conducted research on collagenase inhibition, serum anti-proteases in the cornea and the development of an effective corneal prosthesis. These fields have all come together in this book which describes the development of a keratoprosthesis. He has implanted more than sixty prostheses in cat eyes. He is a charter member of the Keratoprosthesis Study Group and has attended meetings of the group in the United States and Europe. Dr. Barber has published over seventy articles and abstracts in scientific journals including several concerning the development of keratoprostheses. During eighteen years at the University of Texas Medical Branch, nine as Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology, and twelve years as chairman at the St. Francis Medical Center he saw many patients who needed a keratoprosthesis for diseases including Ocular Cicatricial Pemphigoid, Stevens Johnson Syndrome, alkali burns, severe dry eyes, and amoebic keratitis. He ran residency programs at both institutions and trained over ninety ophthalmologists.

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Starting point is 00:00:28 Because you're about to go on a moment. monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks, is Voss here from the E.Cris Foss Show.com. And these ladies and gentlemen, when they are and ladies, things that makes official. Welcome to 2,600 episodes of the Chris Voss show. 16 years going on at 17 of just amazing authors, minds, stories being shared in the Chris Voss show.
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Starting point is 00:01:32 A General Guide to Eye Symptoms on June 29th, 2017. John C. Barber joins us on the show. We're going to be talking to him about his books. And he has spent a career in academic ophthalmology during his fellowship in corneal diseases at Massachusetts eye and ear infirmary in Boston. He began working with corneal prosthetics or prosthesis. prosthetic thesis. He has conducted research on colon genies inhibition, serum antiprotesis in the cornea
Starting point is 00:02:07 and the development of effective corneal work. His fields have come from all together in his book, which describes the development of keratoprothesis. He's implanted more than 60 in cat eyes. Welcome to the show. How are you, John? I'm doing fine. You're great with her pronunciation there.
Starting point is 00:02:26 That's good. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. I flunked medical school, clearly. Well, I see. So give us a dot-coms. Where can people find out more about you on the interwebs? Pardon my...
Starting point is 00:02:41 On the dot-coms, give me your dot-com website. Yeah. John C. Barber. com. So give us a 30,000 overview of your new book. book? Well, the new book, I was at a party, a French Bastille Day party, and several people came up to me and say, hey, doc, what's wrong in my eye? And I decided people needed to have more information about their eyes. So I sat down and wrote the book. Yeah. I had 40 years of
Starting point is 00:03:21 experience with eyes. So I, and I'm used to explaining it in lay terms, not fancy medical terms. So I decided to write it for the general public, although one of my ophthalmology friends tells me that it'd be a good book for beginning residence because you can read it in one or two nights and have a big background of what's going on with the eyes and what people come in and complain about what to do about it. The eyes are an important thing. My eyes started failing me as a child around 10.
Starting point is 00:03:57 My teachers were like, why are you squitting so hard at the screen? And that's because I'm like, well, I'm just trying to focus in. They go, well, you might want to check into that, you know. You might have a thing. And that's when I discovered that I needed classes and that chicks aren't into guys of the classes. But it scarred me at 12. My book about problems like near-sightedness, far-sightedness, stigmatism, things like that.
Starting point is 00:04:28 Presbyopia, where you get to be about 45, you can't redefine print anymore. And I was on a radio talk show once, and I recommended people go to a drugstore by drugstore glasses, and they got all over me about it. But that's all you really need. If you don't wear glasses, you can't redefine print. you go to the drugstore and get 150 or 250 glasses. I recommend you take some fine print with you
Starting point is 00:04:56 and try on the glasses and see what it takes to read. That's why you need to do to fix that. Oh, really? Now, if you wear glasses, you have to add something to the glasses to make them readers. If you don't wear glasses, you can usually just use dime store glasses.
Starting point is 00:05:12 They're a lot cheaper. Oh, wow. Okay. I always in the desert in Morocco one time and we visited some better ones and this woman was making yarn out of camel hair and she was squinting real hard at it while she was spinning it and I gave her a pair of two 50s she put them on and she smiled so broadly and looked at me and that night a little boy walked into camp and we were camping in the desert and a little boy walked in and said I want to pair those glasses for my mother, too.
Starting point is 00:05:48 And so I managed to have another pair. I usually took about a half a dozen pairs. Oh, wow. When I went to foreign countries, especially places like Morocco, Mongolia, and gave them out there, and people were very happy with them. Oh, yeah, it's good to be able to
Starting point is 00:06:04 see. I mean, that's the one thing. I wake up in the morning of my eyesight so bad. I can't, I have to try and find my glasses. Use my phone and use the camera on my phone. Oh, yeah. I can turn my glasses on my desk. And so I have to try and go to bed and I put them down.
Starting point is 00:06:22 And then I got Caritoconus. I noticed there was some Kara medical terms that I was saying there in your bio. Is that related to carotoconus? Well, Kara is the word for the cornea. Okay. And so your cornea is cone-shaped rather than dome-shaped. Yeah. And that's hard to correct with glasses.
Starting point is 00:06:44 Yeah. We can use a contact lens that vaults over the dome and gives you a new surface, and that works. Otherwise, you get a corneal transplant, get rid of the cone, go back to the sphere. And that's what I did at Boston for two years. I learned how to do corneal transplants. I hear the methods gotten better now these days with lasers and different things, I guess. Well, there's a way to shrink the cornea and pull the cone down. and that's been worked on for the last 20 or 30 years.
Starting point is 00:07:17 You're finally getting it perfected to where it works for minor cases and you can pull that cone back down or make it serical and patients see much better. That is awesome, man. I mean, I'm just hoping that if I ever get to the point of cordial transplant, they have something that comes along. My uncle, I mean, this is like 20 years ago, had corneal transplant and he had to have it done twice because it didn't take or, I don't know, whatever, the cornea wasn't working.
Starting point is 00:07:47 I know there's some sort of thing that they can do for me that will, it's supposed to slow the damage. It's, I think it's a corneal thing, or it's something that they do with carotoconis, and I can't find the data on it right off the top of my thing, but there's something they can do now. Anyway, yeah, yeah, there's an old, I don't, you know, just approved. The latest way to do that where you take eyedrops and then they hit it with a laser and that makes it shrink. Oh, yeah, yeah. It just approved, I think, last week by the FDA. Really?
Starting point is 00:08:22 Yeah. Wow. That would really be cool with me. Sounds like anything, anything beats, you know, doing that full surgery with the carotoconis. You know, I don't know if you ever heard of the joke. There's a guy goes into his eye doctor and he says, doctor, every time I drink coffee, I get eye pain. really sharp, and then the doctor says, do you ever take your spoon out of your coffee before you drink it?
Starting point is 00:08:49 You probably heard a few of those jokes over the years. So why did you write this book? What did you want people to know about this, some of the details you offer in? Well, while I was writing the book, I was working at a party, helping serve the wine, and the other fellow, whatever, says, well, I've been getting these flashes and floaters. Does that mean anything? And that maybe just means that the jelly in the eye is separated from the back of the eye and you get this. Or maybe you just pulled a hole in the retina and it's starting to detach.
Starting point is 00:09:25 And so it didn't have a clue that that's what this meant. So I thought, well, I've got a little chapter in there about that where when they, as you age, the jelly in the eye kind of shrinks a little bit. And when it shrinks, if it's stuck to the retina anyplace, it'll pull on the retina. And it may tear a hole in the retina. Oh. And then the fluid in the eye can get behind the retina, and the retina detaches. This fellow went to see his ophthalmologist the next day and had a retina detachment. Got it fixed and did fine after that.
Starting point is 00:10:01 But that's one of the symptoms that brings people into it, is suddenly we've got fireworks in the eye. Yeah. The fireworks are the burst around where the vittress is tugging on the retina. And then the floaters are when you tear off a little bit of it, and it floats around. I had a lady that came to see me. She said she had this thing in her vision that looked like a cockroach. And after the third time calling the guys to get rid of the cockroaches,
Starting point is 00:10:35 she finally came to see me, and she had this floater in the eye that, had the shape of a cockroach and she kept seeing it in their kitchen and but there's the floaters usually get used to them if they don't mean anything there a lot of times it's just a wrinkling of the back surface of that jelly that pulls off and it bunches up and it makes a little floater and you can't get rid of them if you went in with the betrectomy instrument to take them out. It's like putting, getting a speck out of jello. You know, you're going to cause a whole lot more disturbance than you started with. So you usually don't take them out unless they're really bad. I had one patient that had bad vision as a child and it went away in one eye and it ruined
Starting point is 00:11:31 the other eye. But he had this membrane that hung down in his eye. And when he was driving down, the road, it would suddenly, it would swing in front of his vision and block out his vision. So he was afraid to drive. And they bought a recreational vehicle. You're going to retire and drive around the country with it. But he chickened out. He couldn't see well enough. And I took that out for him.
Starting point is 00:11:57 And one of the dangers of taking that out is you can pull the retina off, which is bad. And so I had a retina surgeon. work with me and we saw a little wisp of blood come through the pupil so we immediately examining him found the little hole and fixed it on the table during the operation and he came back to see me a year later he'd been all over the country in his recreational vehicle had a great time and he said his wife and he quit threatening to divorce him he retired at home and uh so i don't know what i saved that marriage or not we'll find out Well, you know, being able to see works good in marriage, sometimes not being able to see works good in the marriage.
Starting point is 00:12:42 Oh, that might be getting old. It depends on what you're looking at. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, so now in your book, what do you hope people come away with in reading it? Do they, can they get a better idea, some of the different eye issues they might be experiencing? Well, I had one friend that read it. and he told me that scared the heck out of him because you know so that many things could go wrong with the eye oh yeah that on the other hand i do put in a basic course about three or four pages on the anatomy
Starting point is 00:13:18 of the eye and how it works and so just reading the first chapter we'll teach you a little bit about the eye and you know more about it and be able to respond better to whatever happens you got to protect your eyesight that's true i put another chapter in about about eye surgery, what do you expect for a cataract operation or readily detachment procedure or an operation to straighten across eyes, that kind of thing, what the surgery involves, it may take away some of the fear people have of eye surgery. Yeah, I mean, I definitely have fear of eye surgery because I hate anybody mucking with my eyes. It's not fun, and you're just kind of like, hey, you know, they're my eyes.
Starting point is 00:14:04 But you really realize how important your eye ocular health is when you lose it. So you want to take care of it before that happens, right? Do you talk about how to take care of your eye? Mm-hmm. Wear your goggles when you play squash. I've seen a few people get hit in the eye with a squash ball. Oh, geez. Didn't do well with it.
Starting point is 00:14:25 Oh, wow. That doesn't sound like something. See, you've got to wear your goggles. Yeah, that doesn't sound, that doesn't sound good at all. Yeah. Yeah. Always, always wear our protection, folks. Very important. What are the things can we learn from your book? And I think you have another book, too. Will you want to plug?
Starting point is 00:14:43 Well, I was professor of ophthalmology and chairman of department in Texas for 18 years. And part of that is I attended the university professors of ophthalmology meetings. And it became a parent talking to the different professors. that a lot of the medical schools were cutting out the time they spent on ophthalmology, more time on MRIs and CTs and things like that, and not as much time on ophthalmology. And so I wrote a book mostly for ophthalmology residents or doctors that want to know more about the eye,
Starting point is 00:15:25 and it's called Examination of the Eye Made Easy. And I taught in medical schools, I taught a lot of students how to examine the eye. You start off with a simple penlight, move it around and see how the eyes move. Then you zoom in and you see how the pupil reacts. And you use the penlight to examine the eye closely, the eyelids, the surface of the eye. And then one of the chapters is about using the thalamoscope, the instruments that they're holding a hand and look in your eye. And you can examine the back of the eye with that.
Starting point is 00:15:59 A lot of people have a lot of trouble learning how to do that. and I learned a lot of tricks during the 40 years of teaching that, and I put those in a book to help students and doctors. Now, I have several doctors when I go see them, they never look in my eye. And the last sentence of the introduction of the book is that a doctor who doesn't look in the eye does himself and his patients in his service. There's so many things you can learn by looking inside the eye, like diabetes, hypertension, lupus, things like that,
Starting point is 00:16:35 that you can diagnose by looking in the eye. And if they skip that, they skip a valuable tool of diagnosis. I used to teach physical diagnosis in medical school and teach the part about the eye. And we talk about the back of the eye as the posterior pole. A student came me one time and says, I can see the back of the eye,
Starting point is 00:16:59 but I can't see a pole back there. He was looking for a barber pole over the back of the eye, so it didn't work. I've had Caritoconus for 30 years, I think, 20 or 30 years. There's lots of debate on how that's
Starting point is 00:17:16 given. Some people say it's genetic. Others say maybe you rubbed your eye too much when you were a kid. I don't know. What's the, have you found or heard anything of consistent data? I've heard all that goes. Yeah. And people that have a lot of allergies and rubbed their eyes a lot tend to get care of
Starting point is 00:17:35 cones. That's where that came from. Although it tends to run in families. So that makes it genetic. So it may be a combination of things that the cornea is later as a collagen, kind of like leather. And if you keep rubbing leather, it will stretch. And so that lends credence to the idea that it's rubbing your eyes too much. But a lot of people haven't had allergies or anything, and they get caratoconus.
Starting point is 00:18:10 So it may be just genetic. I think both theories may be valid. Yeah. I had one doctor. No, I had two doctors. One in Vegas, one in Utah. They said a lot of their patients come from pioneers, and they think it's from pioneering. I don't know if that's true or not.
Starting point is 00:18:28 but then I had another doctor say he sees a lot of it in the Latino community and I don't know that's why I kind of ask I've been you know I've heard all a million reasons as to what whatever at this point with Tricotomy 23
Starting point is 00:18:44 mongloid disease did care to conis oh really and it's a difficult thing when you operate because you have a person that has the IQ of a child and they want to rub their eyes after surgery, which is not good. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:02 And I've had a number of people that came to me because they had a corneal transplant and they rubbed their eyes. Oh, wow. And it didn't, it came loose or broke or something and you have to repair it. And, you know, some of them are sweet little kids, they're 30-year-old little kids. And they want to do right. But they just don't know better.
Starting point is 00:19:27 Yeah. And then you occasionally get the violent chryosomy patient who gets into violent altercations and breaks the sutures and comes loose. And so I tend to not operate for carotoconus on people who were not really responsible for their own actions. And I had picked up several patients from, you know, finding out that the child functions well, can get dressed, plays games, works along with the rest of people, all this, but just can't see very well. But they see well enough to do what they need to do. They don't read, so they don't need 2020 vision.
Starting point is 00:20:19 And if you're better off not operating on them and getting into these complications, as possibly losing the eye. And so it's just a matter of evaluating the whole patient. I mean, I think you'd be smart enough not to rub your eyes after surgery if you had a corneal transplant for your eye. Yeah, no kidding, wherever for that matter. But, yeah, it's really interesting people do that. Now, have we profiled the second book that you wanted to talk about?
Starting point is 00:20:46 Well, that's just an examination of the eye. It's mostly I wrote that for medical students and eye residents. And I get into more detailed examination of the eye, like using the slit lamp, which is the thing they look at you with a microscope. You put your chin up on a little shelf, and they look at you with a slit beam. The slit beam has special optical properties that allow you to see things like little excrescences on the back of the cornea that reflect light, but you can't see them with general light. you have to have a slit beam and that and how to check pressures in the eye and how to do visual fields of things that it's a thing for residents because they aren't getting taught that in medical school what can people like me with carotoconis or fading eye you know i'm
Starting point is 00:21:38 nearsighted in the other eye uh what can people do to are there good vitamins we can take or uh what other things can we do to improve our eye care uh you know well there isn't really much you can do, but besides the collagen shrinking, which has just been approved and the laser treatment. What about taking more Lutee in or anything like? What about taking Lutee in or any of those
Starting point is 00:22:07 herbal remedies? Do they help with eye health? Well, they've been proposed. I'm not sure that that's a, it's something to try, but I'm not sure it's going to do the job. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you just always want to do everything you can to take care of your eyes right oh yeah yeah yeah uh what uh what else do you do speaking consulting coaching on people with eye conditions uh well retired 25 years ago okay so uh i i'm living in a retirement community right now and i gave a lecture on i care it wasn't very well attended but i give a lecture every month on on travel uh when i was 17 years
Starting point is 00:22:50 years old, I went around the world. It was a college course. I got eight hours credit in geography, and I went around the world. And it was a tremendous experience. And when I went to Purdue in the fall, nobody cared if I'd been out of the state. But it's one of those things. But I've traveled very extensively, especially since I retired. And I took a lot of pictures. I gave a talk on that. I taught for 40 years in ophthalmology and then when I retired my first wife died of leukemia about the time I retired and I remarried and my second wife was the wife of a lawyer before
Starting point is 00:23:37 and she was very very intelligent she loved to travel so we traveled a great deal had friends they like to travel, so we traveled in groups and places like Mongolia, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, East Africa, all northern hemisphere. I only went across the equator once, and that was in Tanzania, at the sign that said the equator was there. The little boys were there with the jug of water in the pan, with a hole in the bottom of it, and a matchstick. They put the water in the pan and put the matchstick in, and it would twirling, and one. direction and then they go over the other side of the thing and do the same thing and throw the opposite direction. That's the way sailors used to know if they'd cross the equator
Starting point is 00:24:25 when the swirling went the other way and you're commode flushes in the other direction south of the equator. That's true. I always tease my Australian friends that come on the show about that. I'm like, you guys are always flipping around one way or another. So is what Is your book a good way for consumers, people, you know, normal people that have issues with eyesight, a way they can get educated so they can advocate for themselves and they see their eye doctor then? Well, the hey doc, what's wrong on my eye is a good book for that. I have a disclaimer in the front of it that I'm not treating the eye. I'm just telling you what's going on.
Starting point is 00:25:06 So part of it is ask better questions to the doctor when you go to see him. and I understand what they're telling you. And you read the anatomy part. You can understand what he's saying if he's using medical terms. And that's the thing. The other thing, it would be interesting. My first book, when I retired, my wife said, I married you for life, but not for lunch, so keep busy.
Starting point is 00:25:30 And so I sat down and started writing stories of patients I remembered. And I got up to 100. hundred of them. And they said, if I put these in a book, it might interest somebody into going into medicine. Yeah. And so there are books like the belly dancer needed abdominal surgery. And the woman thought she had worms in her eyes. And there's just a whole lot of interesting patients I had over the years that there's 95 of them or 90 of them in the book.
Starting point is 00:26:07 And there's a couple of stories in there about my residence. I had 90 residents over my career, so I trained 90 ophthalmologists. I didn't feel bad when I retired. But I did that. I had fellows and that's people that have done a residency and they want to specialize. And since I was a cornea specialist, they came to me to specialize in cornea. And I did that 18 years at University of Texas and then came up to Pittsburgh here and spent 13 years at St. Francis Medical Center before it went bankrupt and got sold out to the university. But I had 12 residents a year in Texas, six residents a year at St. Francis. So it's a three-year residency.
Starting point is 00:26:58 And so they were seeing a huge volume of patients. That's why I saw all these interesting patients because all the residents were seeing patients. And I go in and see them after they checked them out. and got a huge volume of interesting patients. One fellow walking down the road, the truck went by and hit him in the eye with a rock. What the hell? And he put up for three or four days.
Starting point is 00:27:24 He told us when one bottle of Old Thunderbird wouldn't kill a pain, he'd come in to see us. A Thunderbird. Very interesting things. I had another patient who lost his eye. He was clearing brush and got hit in the eye with a branch and he wound up sitting at home with it for three or four days came in to see us he had bubbles in his eye which is a bad sign usually means there's bacteria in the eye
Starting point is 00:27:50 that are making gas and so we took out the eye before it spread to his brain and he had indemnity insurance $10,000 for loss of a hand or an eye or a foot you know this kind of thing and he went in to collect on that and found out that he had paid the extra for triple indemnity. So instead of $10,000, he got $30,000. And next time he came
Starting point is 00:28:20 in to see me, his wife was going around the waiting room telling everybody, this guy is so wonderful. He's a super guy. You know, he got the money and he bought me a double wide. The best one of the head. And so, you know, it was that kind of thing.
Starting point is 00:28:36 This guy had also survived Guadal Canal in World War II. Wow. And when we'd go see him, he'd have to tell us how he survived Guadalcanal. And so there's a little old, you know, run across all kinds. And a little old lady sat in the dark for years. Every time a new doctor came to Galveston, she'd go see him. And they said, well, you have to go to Houston to get this taken care of.
Starting point is 00:29:02 She needed a coronal transplant. She said, well, my husband and I, we never go to Houston. We stay here in Galveston. And I showed up in Galveston, a corneal transplants was my big thing. So I said, we'll do a corneal transplant. And the day after surgery, she was going around the waiting room telling everybody, I was happy as I've had good sense. You know, this is the first time I've been without pain for 30 years.
Starting point is 00:29:29 That is awesome. And, you know, they were interesting people. There you go. Very wealthy people. I had some very poor people. had one fellow who's very wealthy and somebody messed up his cataract surgery and I had to fix it
Starting point is 00:29:44 and the next day he was out paying and concede 2040 with the lens and everything and he wound up sponsoring my research for four years so that was a very convenient thing so as we go out give people a final pitch out to order up your book get to know more about you et cetera, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:30:05 Well, they go to my website. It'll tell them how to get it. But the books were all published by an outfit in Bloomington, Indiana, called Authorhouse. There's actually five different publishers under Outer House, and I've used three of them for different reasons. Some of them do better with color prints. Some do better with certain kinds of books. So I did that. I wrote on that that first book I wrote my wife told me to keep busy is called the joy of medical practice 40 years of interesting patients and that's the one that has all those stories and I used to say it's kind of bedtime reading you read one of the four-page chapters and it puts you to sleep so but I also said you could you could read it in the bathroom and one of my surgeon friends said
Starting point is 00:31:03 you show me a man that reads in a bathroom I'll show you a man with hemorrhoids so he's not good I wrote a book about my father my father was a doctor when he was 17 years old he went out duck honey
Starting point is 00:31:18 he lived along the Missouri River and he put a shotgun down over a fence and went off his left thumb he got pellets his left eye he lost his left eye that's before he graduated from high school Jesus and he worked his way. Well, he sold aluminumware door to door during the summers. And he, after he graduated
Starting point is 00:31:41 in high school, he got a teacher certificate and taught one room school for three years and lived at home, saved his money to go to college. Got a BA and a BAS degree from the University of Missouri. And they had a two-year medical school, the first two years of medical school. So we got into that. We finished that and went to Washington University in St. Louis for his last two years. But
Starting point is 00:32:07 one summer he got a job on the pipeline. They were spreading a pipeline across Missouri and he was one of the men that went into the ditch when they hit rock or clay by a lot of roots. They'd have to get down in the ditch and dig it by hand. And after the first
Starting point is 00:32:23 day, his hands were all blistered. He went to the foreman and said, what can I do to fix these blisters and performances? Why are your hands so soft? She says, well, I go to medical school during the rest of the year. And he goes, oh, you go to medical school, you must be smart. And he said, well, smart enough to go to medical school. And he said, well, I need somebody smart to carry the dynamite.
Starting point is 00:32:46 Oh, wow. So my father carried the dynamite all summer. Oh, wow. He was smart enough to take the blasting caps out of the box with the dynamite. So when he dropped the dynamite, nothing happened. But he met my mother waiting tables at her boarding house during college. And, you know, he just, he set his mind to it. He grew up on a farm, a little boy in Missouri, and made his way through medical school.
Starting point is 00:33:17 And he became president of the Illinois chapter of the American ACS, American College of Surgeons. in Illinois, and I never got to watch him see surgery, do surgery, because the week before I was coming home from college to watch him do the surgery, one of the other doctor's sons came, and as soon as he made the incision, the guy passed out, hit the floor, got a gash in his head, and half the operating room was diverted looking after him, so they wouldn't let anybody else come in and observe in the operating room, so I didn't get to see him operate. Oh, wow. That's unfortunate. He was quite an inspiration to me, and a lot of people. You made you want to become a doctor? Yeah. Well, thank you very much for coming the show.
Starting point is 00:34:09 We really appreciate it. Wonderful stuff there. Thank you, John. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Order of John's book, wherever fine books are sold. It's called, Hey, Doc, what's wrong with my eye? A general guide to eye symptoms out June 29th, 2017. Probably a good thing to find out what your eye and please take care of your eye health. I wish I'd taken better care of mine. Thanks for honest for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss. LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, won the TikTok and the yellow's crazy place in the internet.
Starting point is 00:34:39 Beg you to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have a...

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