Two new optometrists have taken the reins at Town Eye Care since Rob Town retired last year after decades of service.
Rachel Amaral started at the office full-time two months ago, moving to Orillia from Kitchener.
With family in Barrie, and time spent in Orillia growing up, she happily took the opportunity to move to the city earlier this year.
“My family used to come camping in Orillia every summer, so I kind of knew about Orillia already, and I looked up here to see if anyone was offering and looking for an optometrist,” she told OrilliaMatters. “It’s been really nice, and I feel like the community has really welcomed me to the area, which is great.”
Amaral, 28, graduated from the University of Waterloo’s optometry program in 2020, where she also secured a one-year residency in ocular disease — one of only a handful in Canada — following graduation.
She said the residency provided her with plenty of exposure to unique eye issues most optometrists only come across occasionally in their day-to-day work.
“The way I like to think of it is it gave me 10 to 20 years of clinical experience in a single year. If you’re in a practice like this, it’s a lot of routine eye care. Every once in a while, you’ll get something unique or challenging, or something you’ve never seen before, and it can be a little bit intimidating if you hadn’t encountered it previously,” she said.
“When you do a year of just seeing people who have a particular condition that you’re managing, you automatically will get really comfortable with it off the bat.”
Amaral is also pursuing a master’s in public health for family and community medicine at the University of Toronto on top of her daily work as an optometrist.
The other new optometrist at Town Eye Care, Megan Byer, also graduated in 2020.
Originally from Oshawa, Byer was educated in the United States and also completed a residency in primary care and ocular disease at the Illinois Eye Institute in Chicago.
She started part-time at the office last year, and she commutes to Orillia on a weekly basis.
“I love it. The patients are great. The community is great. That small-town feel makes it easy. Everyone’s really nice,” she said.
Byer, 31, describes herself as a “huge nerd about eyes” who has always been interested in working in medicine.
“I always knew I wanted to do something in medicine I liked. I liked that sort of 9-to-5, good work-life balance, and then, as it turned out, I actually really enjoyed eyes,” she said. “I like how it’s problem solving and … it also has sort of that fun fashion aspect with picking out glasses.”
With two optometrists at the office who have completed residencies in ocular disease, Amaral said, they are well prepared to address more complicated issues than what an average optometry practice handles, on top of providing standard primary care.
“Not a lot of optometrists are residency trained, and both of us are,” she said.
“We do a lot more co-management of eye diseases than an average optometrist, so we co-ordinate with both of the local ophthalmologists or the surgeons in town to take on more of their glaucoma patients now that we practise here. In eye emergencies, we really prefer that people come see us versus having to wait for the ER for eight hours, and (we) try to funnel a lot of those emergency appointments to our clinic.”
Byer also noted a routine eye check can reveal a wide range of broader health issues in patients.
“The other day, I had a young, 30-year-old guy come in with complications from MS, (and) he didn’t have that diagnosis before. It’s something that presents in the eyes, and we can diagnose that,” she said.
“We can diagnose diabetes in the back of the eye; we can diagnose high blood pressure in the back of the eye; we can actually see plaque in the back of the eye that could be an impending stroke. So, there are lots of different sort of medical conditions that we can find just by doing a regular eye exam.”
Amaral said Town Eye Care is always looking to take on new patients.
