Ryan Pine grew up six to eight miles outside Martinsville, driving tractors, baling hay, and raising pigs. Medicine was not on the horizon. When his Martinsville guidance counselor helped steer him toward Illinois State University, he enrolled as a computer science major because it seemed reasonable.

Six months in, he realized it wasn't.

"I got there for about six or seven months and thought, what am I doing? I don't even like this."

Coming home felt like a setback. It wasn't.

His mother had remarried an ophthalmologist in Charleston, and while Pine figured out his next move, he started working in the practice. Watching his stepfather restore patients' vision sparked something unexpected. Then one of those patients changed his life.

Jerry Fedragon was a guidance counselor at Lake Land Community College, legally blind from macular degeneration. He saw something in the young farm kid helping around the office. "You're really good with people," he told him. "You talk really well. You should do this."

Pine's response was instinctive. "I'm a farm boy from Martinsville. 

There's no way I could ever get into medical school."

Fedragon had a plan anyway. He mapped out a two-year path through Lakeland, a transfer, and the MCAT. Pine thought he was crazy. He took him up on it.

A few months in, something shifted. "I realized, oh my gosh, I can actually do this schooling thing. This is not hard. All you have to do is show up and study a little bit." The student who'd been an unremarkable B in high school graduated with near-perfect marks from there forward. He got into medical school at Southern Illinois University. He entered ophthalmology.

For years, through medical school and residency, Pine received letters. They were shaky, barely legible, handwritten Fedragon following his progress, sending encouragement, noting milestones. The letters kept coming until Fedragon passed away, probably around 2010 or 2012. "I really give him a lot of credit for getting me on the right track," Pine said.

At his residency interview at the University of Kansas, Pine was asked to describe himself in one word. He hadn't prepared for it. He said: "Genuine."

The interviewer told him that it might be one of the better answers she'd heard. When she asked why, he told her: he was raised on a farm in a small town, and what she was getting was exactly what she saw; someone who would work hard, tell the truth, and treat it as his career to get right, not hers to evaluate.

He won Chief Resident of the Year two years in a row the first junior ever given the award. The residency program attributed it, consistently, to how he talked to patients. "Sometimes the smartest people were the ones who had the hardest time with patients," he said. "They could get an A plus on every test, but when they went and put it in front of patients, and they had to just communicate, boy, they fell off pretty quickly."

The kid who grew up elbow-to-elbow with every walk of life in Martinsville had no such problem.

He came back to Charleston and practiced alongside his stepfather until his stepfather retired. His practice grew fast although never through advertising. "Word of mouth is what we relied on," he said. "That's kind of what a small town is." The average cataract surgeon performs around 224 surgeries a year. For the last five years, Pine has averaged 1,500 — doing 15 by 11:30 Tuesday mornings and 15 more by Thursday midday. When patients complain about the three-month wait, his response is simple: "You don't want to go eat at a restaurant nobody's at."

A few years ago, he sold the practice to Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center, not because he had to, but because he looked at the region and saw what was missing. "Are you going to finish the last part of your career for yourself, or are you going to do something that's better for your community and have something as a lasting impression when you're done?" The answer led to the Pine Eye Center, now being built on the Sarah Bush campus with specialists in retina, glaucoma, and beyond.

His Martinsville guidance counselor, the one who first pointed him toward college, showed up years later with her mother. Pine did the cataract surgery. A couple of years after that, she came back for her own. "For as crazy as a, maybe as an undirected kid as she saw me in high school," he said, "she trusted me when I got older."

He is married to Jerri, has two baseball-playing sons, and still considers his Martinsville classmates, all 25 or so of them, his best friends. "It doesn't matter what you're going through," he said. "You need people to lean on."

The farm taught him to work. The town taught him to talk to people. And a barely legible letter from a legally blind man told him to keep going.