Practicing medicine in the Magic City is something that comes quite naturally to Trinity ophthalmologist Dr. Robert Gokey, who carries on a family legacy of service in Minot.

His grandfather Dale Flickinger began the tradition during his 36-year career as general surgeon, and Gokey grew up watching his mother Susan Gokey manage the household and her career as an emergency physician for Trinity Health.

“My mom took care of us during the day and worked at night,” Gokey said. “She’d drop us off and fall asleep and all she needed was that recharge. I don’t know how she did it.”

Gokey said his interest in medicine as a career was one he came by naturally, without any excessive pressure from family to carry the torch forward.

“Nobody was ever really pushing me to become a doctor. That was something I always thought was cool,” Gokey said. “You’re little. You’re not feeling good. They tell you to drink this pink stuff that tastes like bubblegum. Then you’re feeling good, and I’m like, ‘What is this wizardry?'”

Gokey ran with his interest in medicine and the history of its innovations as he went through school and matriculated at the University of North Dakota. During his undergraduate years Gokey worked as a ward secretary in the Trinity Emergency Trauma Center, showing interest in internal medicine and infectious diseases as a third-year medical student. However, during his one-week rotation with the Fargo VA, Gokey found himself inspired to take his career in a totally different direction.

“I showed up the first day not really knowing what to expect. We did 10 cataracts and we came the next day and nine out of the10 people we saw were 20/20. The last patient was 20/40 and he was kind of grumbling about how things weren’t clear. I go to talk to the doctor and she turns to me and says, ‘Robb, he was 2400 yesterday. Textbook definition of legal blindness is 2200. He could only see the big ‘E,'” Gokey said. “It was just such a difference. We went from all of these people with all these things going wrong, but it could be fixed. You could deliver world-changing outcomes.”

Gokey said medical school typically doesn’t provide much exposure to ophthalmology as a field, but his hands-on experience illuminated exactly the direction he wanted to take his career. He would take advantage of a rotation over the holidays with Trinity Health ophthalmologists Darrell Williams and Chad Wolsky as well as vitreoretinal surgeon David Jacobs.

“I got to see the vitrectomy surgery for the first time. My goodness, that is a view of the back of the eyeball that is utterly unparalleled. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I imagine it’s what astronauts must feel like,” Gokey said. “You see the hills, the valleys, the dips. With retina, you have people where the lights are out. You do surgery, the lights are on. That’s magic.”

Gokey would go on to complete his ophthalmology residency at Ochsner-Louisiana State University Shreveport and a fellowship in vitreoretinal surgery at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Gokey has settled into his niche since becoming board certified, working to help patients restore and preserve their vision and overcome age-related conditions such as macular degeneration and detached retinas. While he stressed that some situations cannot be improved, medicine has the ability to intervene and improve the vision and living conditions for patients in danger of losing their sight completely.

“Retina is fascinating. We have lots of people with bad eye problems from diabetes, so you do injections of medicine to the back of the eye, you use lasers. You keep them seeing. Some of these people come in blind or nearly blind and they come out the other side still seeing. You don’t win every time. Gosh no. I’ve done this now two years of fellowship, I’m still shocked by things I’ve seen hundreds of times. It is so not boring,” Gokey said. “We know so much about retina, but at the same time, we are always learning.”