With my wife just discharged from the hospital and myself suffering from both laryngitis and bronchitis, my arrival in Chicago for this year’s AAO annual meeting began rather inauspiciously. Since the Academy is primarily a social gathering, my inability to carry a conversation without hacking up a lung severely limited what socializing I was able to do. It also didn’t help that I was featured on the cover of the meeting program this year, which led to a lot of congratulatory text messages and even more social calls than usual. On Friday, after checking into my hotel, I joined our residents and fellows at the Cornea Society party, which as in prior years has become bigger, louder, and darker – I could barely see or hear anyone there. Next morning, I was glad my booth talk at Zeiss was sparsely attended, and I enjoyed a private preview of upcoming features for their intraoperative OCT system. After grabbing lunch with a collaborator from UCSF, I attended a few final sessions from Subspecialty Day, which again taught me nothing new and reinforced my decision not to register for this event again. I rested at the hotel until the evening, then stopped by the Harvard alumni reception before dinner with the Allergan team including their CEO. My voice had not recovered much by Sunday, which made for a rough morning teaching two Skills Transfer courses. I was consoled, however, by a participant who came up after my talk to commend my teaching style and confirm that I was the author of the 300-slide board review powerpoint which had apparently gone viral and passed between trainees across the country. For lunch, I had some chicken pho with a fellow clinician-scientist at UW to soothe my throat, then returned to the conference to see my resident’s poster win best-in-category. By the time I returned to ORD for my flight out, I felt like I had spent more time conversing with Uber drivers than with actual friends at the meeting. Despite lamenting my bad luck for getting sick, I was nevertheless glad that I have no clinical or call duties when I get back next week.