It was a memorable first day for Elena Monks, OD in her brand new practice, Eyes on Southern in Royal Palm Beach, Florida. On Tuesday, Sept. 10, she was busy getting ready for her first patients to come in, when her Maui Jim rep, James Keyser, stopped by to wish her well. With some delays in getting the practice opened, she had been storing her Maui Jim frames at her house, so he stopped by to see if he could lend a hand in getting them set up.
That was all under control, but she asked if she could “borrow his eyeballs. I wanted to be sure that all of my data was transferring from my autorefractor to the electronic health records,” she recalls. He agreed, noting that his vision in his left eye had been a little dark and wavy. “Luckily, I had my brand new Maestro OCT, an ocular coherence tomographer, already set up next to the autorefractor and I decided to scan James just in case. When I scanned the right eye, and I saw a large retinal detachment with macula on, and in the left eye, the retina was fully detached with macula off.”
FAST ACTION
Dr. Monks immediately began to quiz him on whether he recently had surgery or a change in medications. She sent the images to a retina specialist, who quickly contacted another. “She would not let me leave until I had an appointment scheduled,” Keyser says. A day later, he had a three-hour visit with the specialist who was able to laser the partial detachment. On Sept. 12—just 48 hours after he first walked into Dr. Monks’ office—Keyser had his procedure for the second eye.
During the workups, Keyser learned he had type 2 diabetes, undiagnosed up until that time. “I am so grateful for Dr. Monks. I had been telling myself I needed an eye exam because I was not seeing as well as I usually do. The morning before I went in, I noticed the dark and wavy vision, and when I mentioned that, I saw her immediate concern.”
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Keyser says in the less than two months since this happened, “I’ve completely changed my diet and lifestyle. I have lost 25 pounds,” he says. He’s an optician by training and a frame rep. “I’m in and out of eye doctors’ offices all the time. What was I doing delaying this visit?” He says the lesson in his experience is a little obvious but worth repeating: don’t delay taking care of yourself.
Dr. Monks says she was grateful she had the time and technology to make that first assessment. Opening this practice has been a dream for her.
INSPIRED BY WO STORIES
“I have been looking at the practice design stories in womeninoptometry.com for a long time. It inspired me to see young women with little children having their own practices. I was at the point in my life where I wanted to try that, too,” she says. She has worked in nearly every modality of practice: VA, corporate, private and ophthalmology locations. “I had always assumed that people who opened their own businesses had a really strong business background, but through those WO stories, I saw that it more initiative and willingness to learn.”
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SLOW BUT EXCITING PROGRESS
She began to look for existing practices to purchase but didn’t find any. She reached out to iCare Advisors and began to explore the idea of starting cold. “I found a place five minutes from my house, in a new shopping area.” The space featured 19’ ceilings and huge display windows. She signed the lease in May 2023, hoping to open in December 2023. She joined Vision Source, purchased all of her equipment—and waited, driving by regularly to see the slow process. “It was exciting to see it go from nothing to an entire plaza,” she says.
The silver lining in the delays is that she has patients eager to get in. “People were waiting for me to open. They saw it on Google maps and their insurance provider listings. In her third week of being open, she was already booked for three days a week of patient care with about five to 10 patients a day.
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She understands the success will not come overnight, but she’s leaning into all of her support sources. iCare Advisors, for example, connected her with a bank, lawyers and real estate agents to help get her started. “They have such clear tasks and steps outlined; I knew I was making progress.”
And all of that led to a most memorable first day – for her and for her unscheduled patient.
