Time out with T.O. – Catching a star

Donny Suh, MD, is one special dude.

I knew from his first slide at a presentation to the UNMC Board of Counselors in 2017. It showed his “twin brother” — Ndamukong Suh, former Husker defensive lineman and current NFL star.

With that joke, he had the room full of Nebraskans in the palm of his hand.

Dr. Suh’s (pronounced Saw) improbable path to Omaha almost defies the imagination. The John & Irene Graether Endowed Chair in Pediatric Ophthalmology, Dr. Suh said it happened as a result of “angels and miracles.”

The story begins in Incheon, a city of nearly 3 million people in South Korea. Donny is living with his mother, Young, and brother, Davey, in a one-room underground home built on a thin layer of cement. His father, John, has left the family to go to the U.S. to try to provide more support.

When Donny is 7, he remembers going to an ophthalmologist in Seoul with his mother. She has an eye problem — a chronically infected and blocked tear duct that makes her eye water and produces pus.

His mother brought a paper bag filled with all the money the family could muster. The ophthalmologist tells her, “That’s not enough. You’ll have to come back.”

As they walk home in the pitch dark, Donny tells his mother, “I’m going to be an eye doctor and fix people like you.”

Given the family’s limited finances, his mother tells Donny, “That’s impossible . . . that would be like catching a star.”

“When I hear ‘that’s impossible,’ that invigorates me . . . excites me to no end,” Dr. Suh said.

A few years later, Donny’s father returns to South Korea to bring his family back to the U.S. He has established a successful wig business in Fort Worth, Texas.

Donny is in seventh grade. He speaks no English. His South Korean wardrobe is 20 years behind U.S. styles. He’s wearing bell bottoms with pleats. “The kids at school thought I was dressed for Halloween,” he said. “I didn’t know what Halloween was.”

Donny picked up English quickly and was soon selling wigs in his father’s shop. Turns out, he was a natural salesman.

“I know more about wigs than I do about eyeballs,” Donny said. “I can sell you anything. I can talk your ears off. It comes from being below everybody else. You have to treat customers like kings and queens. You have to learn to read people, watch their eyes and learn what it is that they want.”

His first angel — a Latin teacher in high school — believed in Donny and gave him hope. Soon, he was on his way to Rice for college and Baylor for medical school.

His second angel — a hospital janitor in Houston — encountered Donny when he was discouraged in medical school because he didn’t see many doctors who were happy.

“He told me, ‘Why don’t you have the courage to break the mold?'” Dr. Suh said. “It was a huge 10-minute conversation.”

In 2000, his mother died, one month before Donny finished his ophthalmology fellowship at Johns Hopkins. He will never forget her last words to him — “Don’t forget why you became a doctor — to help others.”

Each year, he takes a medical mission for ORBIS International providing free ophthalmological care to needy people in less fortunate countries around the world.

The missions brought another angel into his life — a 5-year-old girl in Romania who had crossed eyes (strabismus). The surgery Donny performed completely changed her outlook on life.

“She had never smiled before the surgery,” he said. “The next day she came to me with a beautiful smile on her face and gave me a big hug. It was life changing.”

Four years later, Dr. Suh found himself in complete burnout. “I had lost my purpose in life, my why for being a doctor,” he said. “Then, I got a letter from the Romanian girl. She asked how I was doing and said she had decided to become a nurse so she could help people like I do.”

It was just what the doctor ordered.

“It was one of the turning points in my life,” Dr. Suh said. “I was able to regain my passion and find my purpose.

“I thought I was the lighthouse that was giving people direction and hope. I realized that was not true. It was the people I was helping who give me purpose to live. I live my life for my patients. I think a lot of young doctors are losing the why and becoming discouraged. All they have to do is look to the patients.”

For Dr. Suh, the mantra remains. A pediatric ophthalmologist, he has built a strong clinical and research enterprise at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center and UNMC. He continues to give back to others, establishing an eye clinic to provide free eye glasses to needy children.

An “outside-the-box thinker,” Dr. Suh was recognized with his endowed chair earlier this month. He also was inducted into the prestigious American Ophthalmological Society — only the third UNMC ophthalmologist to be enshrined (Stan Truhlsen, MD, and Ronald Krueger, MD, are the others).

And, he just finished writing his memoir — “Catching a Star: My Story of Hope.”

I’ve got to think his mother would be proud.