I will start by saying that this is not your usual eyecare article, but reflecting back on my other life experiences, I look at how they have helped me become the optometrist that I am today. In this case, we look at how my history with storms has helped me tackle the battles with clinical uncertainty.
The activity of storm chasing is inherently dangerous and, for your wellbeing and my peace of mind, please do not engage in this activity without proper guidance (or, if you have good common sense… do not do it at all!)
I hope you enjoy reading this as I did reflecting upon, writing, and publishing it!
Reflections From a Decade On…
On May 24th, 2016, I stood in a muddy Kansas field watching the Dodge City Outbreak unfold. Today marks exactly 10 years to the day since that event. It remains my favourite chase. It was staggering, awe-inspiring display of atmospheric violence where multiple tornadoes carved through the landscape simultaneously.
When you tell people you used to spend your springs navigating the “bear’s cage” of supercells in the American Midwest, they usually ask about the adrenaline. They assume the terror of a quarter-mile-wide wedge tornado bearing down on you must be the most stressful experience imaginable.
One of my favourite photographs from the day. This particular storm spawned three simultaneous tornadoes (only the second time in recorded history that it has happened!)
But the truth is, I often felt calmer staring down a rotating wall cloud than I do sitting six patients deep in a busy clinic. Battling the nuances of patient management software designed by developers rather than clinicians, while juggling contradictory local management criteria, creates a very different type of storm. It is a slow-moving front of decision fatigue and administrative hoops.
As I eventually traded the road for the consulting room (and the chase for the deeper anchor of my family – a toddler definitely require lots of chasing!) I realised that the survival skills I learned tracking storms were the exact tools I needed to advocate for my patients. The plains taught me how to handle chaos, and surprisingly, that translates perfectly to the consulting room.
Here are six things storm chasing taught me about surviving the role of an optometrist.
1. Redefining the Nature of Fear and Threat
Growing up, I experienced horrific bullying. That kind of childhood trauma creates a very specific, suffocating social fear; a feeling of being constantly judged, trapped, and unsafe in your own environment. It is an abstract dread that drips into your daily life.
Standing in the elements, however, nearly being struck by lightning or sideswiped by a tornado, introduces you to a completely different fear. It is primal, kinetic, and entirely logical. You respect the storm, you read the data, and you move. Surviving both ends of that spectrum fundamentally rewired my neurobiology and gave me a massive advantage when dealing with clinical uncertainty.
One of the most iconic memories of the day was driving on a very muddy dirt track towards a storm that has twin tornadoes. Very much a metaphor for times where there are multiple significant decisions that affect our days.
When a clinic day devolves into chaos; perhaps the OCT scanner crashes, the software freezes, or an angry patient is shouting at the front desk, I can feel the collective blood pressure of the practice rise. But internally, I am quickly calibrating my stress response. My brain asks: Is this life-or-death? Is there a literal tornado bearing down on us? No. It is just a procedural problem. Having experienced what true, physical peril feels like, the sting of an administrative disaster is completely neutralised.
This perspective is a quiet superpower. It allows you to compartmentalise the noise. You stop viewing an overbooked diary or a difficult referral pathway as a threat to your existence, and instead see it as a puzzle to be solved. You do not panic, because you know what real danger feels like. When you remove the existential dread from the workplace, you have so much more mental bandwidth left to simply sit with the patient, listen to their symptoms, and navigate their clinical uncertainty with a steady hand.
2. The Locum’s “Hitchcock Motel” Reality
I recently spoke to a colleague who mentioned that their absolute baseline for feeling “safe” and comfortable when travelling is a 4-star hotel. It is a juxtaposition for me. During my chasing years, I stayed in places where the very premise of a 1-star rating would have felt like an unattainable luxury.
I remember a particularly psycho-esque motel in Colorado where the owner peered at us at breakfast through tiny, twitching curtains. We ate breakfast cereal covered in bugs, playing a grim game of “what body part did that hair come from?” (if you are ever staying at a conference with me – please ask me about these stories – it will honestly put that complaint of not enough coffee sachets in the room into perspective!)
Then there was the Texas-Mexico border town where a drug-related crime and a near-murder unfolded in the room next door. I have stayed in rough Oklahoma motels where hard drugs were done openly in the car park, and an adult movie was quite clearly being filmed through the adjacent wall. When you have slept soundly amidst cockroaches and filth, your fussiness drops to absolute zero.
An example of the overnight accommodation used whilst storm chasing
But how does this relate to optometry?
This total abandonment of the need for “perfect conditions” is vital for surviving as a locum optometrist. We rarely walk into a flawless environment. Sometimes the phoropter head is stiff, the room is the size of a broom cupboard, the trial frame is missing its axis knob, and you are surrounded by clinical uncertainty because previous records are entirely missing.
If your baseline requires a 4-star clinical setup to function, you will crumble. The “Hitchcock Motel” mindset taught me that fussiness is a luxury I don’t need. It taught me to say: It isn’t perfect, but it is shelter, and it is all we have got, so let’s make the most of it. You identify the bare minimum needed to provide safe, effective care, and you get to work without letting the metaphorical filth of a broken system distract you from the patient in the chair.
3. Navigating Clinical Uncertainty in the “Bear’s Cage”
In 2018, during my first day acting as a lead chase (essentially the one calling the shots for the team), I faced a significant call. We were boxed in. I had to choose between turning the car around and driving directly into a hailstorm dropping four-inch hailstones (which local radio reported were destroying houses), escaping into an area strictly designated as a no-go zone for tourists, or continuing along a path where a tornado was actively developing right in front of us. It was an intense, high-stakes moment where every single choice carried a risk of physical harm.
The supercell that traversed Pine Ridge, South Dakota in May 2018
Yet, strangely, I found that decision drastically easier to make than some of the choices I face when knee-deep in a clinical environment. In the “bear’s cage” of a storm, feedback is immediate, binary, and pure. You make the call, and you survive. But in optometry, you are constantly battling clinical uncertainty. You might have a patient with pathologies that do not fit neatly into the local management criteria, which somehow differs entirely from the criteria of the other three health authorities you worked in that same week.
Decision Fatigue
The stress in a clinic stems from system-induced friction. It is the creeping, abstract anxiety of decision fatigue. You aren’t just deciding what is best for the patient; you are trying to guess what a referral triage service will accept, or what the software developer intended when they built a rigid drop-down menu.
The fear of being “wrong” in a clinic is an exhausting, delayed weight. Storm chasing taught me that when the data becomes chaotic and the pathways contradict each other, you have to strip the problem down to its core. Is this a logical problem, a procedural one, or an emotional one?
When faced with massive clinical uncertainty, I ignore the administrative noise, rely on my moral compass, and make the call that best affirms the dignity and health of the individual. After all – they are the reason we are there!
4. The Beauty of “Hailstorm Green”
There is a specific, sickly, mesmerising shade of green that the sky turns right before a massive hailstorm hits. It is one of my absolute favourite colours in the world. It is terrifying because you know exactly what kind of destruction is about to fall from the clouds, but it is also undeniably, breathtakingly beautiful.
Standing in the elements, watching a town potentially face being wiped off the map, is a profoundly humbling experience. You are witnessing the absolute limit of human control, and yet, it is a privilege to be there to see nature operate at that scale.
The “hailstorm-green” of a supercell is one of my all-time favourite colours.
Healthcare can feel very similar. The systems we work within are deeply flawed, often destructive to practitioner morale, and occasionally hostile to the very patients they are meant to serve. Burnout is rampant, and the sheer volume of clinical uncertainty we navigate daily can make the profession feel like a relentless grind. It is very easy to become completely cynical and only see the damage.
But just as you can appreciate the green sky before the hail hits, you have to find the profound beauty in the clinical encounter. Being an optometrist is an incredible privilege. When the door closes and it is just you and the patient, you have the opportunity to listen, to solve a puzzle, to relieve anxiety, and to protect someone’s sight.
Finding that beauty amidst the systemic wreckage is a deliberate choice. When the administrative hail starts raining down, I try to remember the awe I felt on the plains. It reminds me to look past the broken systems, maintain my empathy, and appreciate the raw, human privilege of the work we actually do.
5. Destination Unknown vs. The Clinical Protocol
One of the greatest joys of storm chasing was the “Destination Unknown” road trip lifestyle (and yes, we often played that track on our travels). You wake up, look at the weather models, pick a target (often hundreds of miles away), and just drive. It was a wonderfully supportive community of friends and experts. Even now, I am in daily contact with my closest chasing colleagues, discussing UK weather events and watching how climate change is clearly altering storm patterns. But the core truth of the chase is this: you cannot control the weather. You can only control your readiness, your navigation, your equipment, and your teamwork.
Controlling readiness, preparing navigation, checking equipment, and teamwork – parallels of sucessful storm chasing and minimising the levels of clinical uncertainty.
In optometry, the desire to control everything is exactly what burns people out. We are given clinical protocols that suggest human biology fits neatly into flowcharts. But patients are complex, subjective, and messy. We face clinical uncertainty every single day, exacerbated by software that fights us and management that demands impossible efficiencies. If you try to control the “weather” of the healthcare system, you will drive yourself mad.
Chasing taught me to focus strictly on what is inside the car. I cannot control the changing NHS pathways, the buggy IT infrastructure, or the fact that I am running twenty minutes late because a previous patient needed an emergency referral. What I can control is my own clinical excellence, my communication, and the environment I create for the person sitting in my chair.
By accepting the unpredictability of the day; treating the clinic schedule as a “Destination Unknown”, I let go of the systemic friction. I embrace the reality that while I cannot dictate the storms of the healthcare system, I can absolutely control how I navigate my patients safely through them.
6. Knowing When to Stop Chasing and Master Clinical Uncertainty
The chasing years were, without a doubt, some of the best days of my life. But the environment changed. The roads became more dangerous as the hobby grew in popularity, the storms themselves shifted, and, most importantly, my own life changed. I now have a wife and a son. They are a hand far too valuable to gamble with for the sake of an adrenaline rush.
Recognising when the stakes have shifted, and having the maturity to walk away from the extreme danger, is perhaps the most important survival skill of all.
An EF4 tornado in Bennington, Kansas, on May 25th 2016. The sheer scale, power, and immediate proximity of this tornado redefined fear for me.
I don’t chase tornadoes in the American Midwest anymore (well, not physically at least!). But that doesn’t mean I stopped being an explorer, or that I lost the drive to face down complex problems. I simply changed the terrain. The energy, the strategic thinking, and the risk assessment that kept me safe in the bear’s cage are now poured entirely into my professional life, my teaching, and my advocacy work.
The clinical uncertainty we face as optometrists is a different kind of monster, but it requires the exact same skillset: situational awareness, rapid decision-making under pressure, and the courage to trust your own moral compass when the map is blank.
The storms I chase now are systemic. I want to build better educational tools, advocate for fairer working conditions, and help the next generation of eye care professionals navigate the chaos of their own careers. I traded the high-stakes physical storm for the high-stakes reality of family and professional integrity. Looking back over the last ten years, it is the best decision I ever made.
Conclusion
Ten years ago today, I was navigating a muddy Kansas field, surrounded by the beautiful, terrifying unpredictability of the Dodge City outbreak. Today, my terrain is different, but the mission remains identical: parsing the chaos, finding the beauty, and cutting through the noise.
Clinical uncertainty isn’t something we can eliminate from optometry, but it is something we can learn to out-navigate. You don’t have to face the administrative gale or the diagnostic fog alone.
I built my community platform precisely to be the supportive dashboard we all need – a space packed with practical tools, clinical simulators, and peer mentorship designed by a clinician, for clinicians, to help you steady your hand in the exam room.
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