ARVO 2019

Hello everyone! It's me, Sam. It's been a while since I've blogged, and I'm very grateful for Kiley in taking the lead to write about our lives. 

I was blessed to be accepted to present at this year's Annual Meeting for the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO). Luckily, when I showed up to the conference on Monday, I ran into Grant Justin (a current 2^nd year resident who is a lot of fun to work with) and Hal Blegen (one of our Rockstar, up-and-coming first years). We decided to go on a bike ride around Vancouver, so we rented a couple bikes and went around Stanley Park. It was gorgeous! Here are some of the photos from our ride:

Grant and I then went to the aquarium and had a good time looking at all the animals. 

We ate poutine for lunch (French fries loaded with pulled pork and bacon), and then Grant and Hal presented in the evening. I had a good time networking with people, and I also found Dr. Das’ group presenting their research (the ones I worked with during medical school). So I got to catch up with them a bit! That was great.

Here are medals from the 2010 Olympics held in Vancouver, as well as the podium where the medal winners stood while their anthems played. How cool!

The following day, after going to a few lectures, I met up with an HPSP medical student who was also presenting at ARVO to talk to her about ophthalmology in the military. She’s currently rotating through our program and doing great. It’s tough to predict what will happen with military medicine in the future, with all the changes that are going on with the DHA and purplization of the military, but hopefully that won’t affect this year’s match. In fact, residency/fellowship results are supposedly being announced tomorrow, and I'm planning on applying for a retina fellowship if one is offered. Wish me luck!

            My presentation was on Tuesday evening. I was pretty stoked about my poster:

As you can probably tell, I decided to have fun with it this year. I presented a case series on patients with central retinal artery occlusion who were treated with hyperbaric oxygen, and since it wasn’t a super enticing research design (case series), I decided to make my poster as flashy as possible. It did the trick! About 80% of the people who passed by my poster stopped to read it, and I got to speak with about half of them about our findings. That is a huge contrast to the last time I was at ARVO and presented "real" research. I also got lots of great feedback from physicians from all over the world regarding management of patients and their views of hyperbaric oxygen. It was awesome!

I guess that's it for now. More to come later!