I saw my eye doctor today. Dr. Cliff Courtenay is an extremely competent ophthalmologist who has cared for my eyes for nearly thirty years. Beyond being the type of doctor who takes the time to really explain things, he also has a really cool past. He is one of the two guys that ran out on the field and around the bases when Hank Aaron hit home run number 715 (seriously, I am not kidding; check it out).
On an early Tuesday morning, I found myself in Dr. Courtenay’s care for a problem in my right eye. Called central serous retinopathy (CSR), it is basically fluid that gets under the retina, causing a bulge. The result is a distortion in the field of vision. I have had this before (CSR frequently occurs in one eye, for white men who are busy professionals — BINGO!). After numerous tests and a computer analysis of the resulting eye scans, it turns out that it just needs to be watched to make sure it doesn’t turn into something worse. The likelihood is that it will resolve on its own, as it has in past years when it manifested.
What really caught my attention this visit was that Dr. Courtenay was very thorough, perhaps more so than when it had occurred years back. As we discussed it, he stressed to me the need for him to do multiple tests to make sure that what he was seeing was in fact CSR and not something else. It would have been easy, perhaps understandable, for him to see the eye scan, note the bulge under the retina, and, given my history, decide it had returned. Not only did he not do that, he went about checking several other conditions, using tests that would indicate something contrary to CSR. Exactly! We are often presented with something that looks and acts like something and we assume it is so. Perhaps we don’t do the equivalent of the other checks to verify our conclusion. If it turns out to be something completely different, it could be that since we didn’t positively identify what it was at the outset, the ability to bring a situation to a positive conclusion would be harder or impossible.
When we are faced with the “obvious,” I will run a couple of “tests” against it to see if there is anything that surfaces that is contrary to the obvious. If nothing surfaces, the extra seconds of verification will not have been wasted. But if data surfaces that contradicts the obvious, then we should dig deeper to find the root cause and make sure we have a full grasp on the situation or the problem we are trying to solve. Spending time working a problem is a critical step, but that time is wasted if we are working on solving the wrong problem.