Seeing Quadruple

By Mark Loehrke
February 2023 View more Community

Vision care is a family affair for the Andreolis

It almost feels like the setup for an Abbott and Costello–style routine. A patient walks into Naperville’s Northwestern Medicine Ophthalmology clinic and says he has an appointment with Dr. Andreoli. “Of course,” the receptionist replies. “And which Dr. Andreoli would that be?” Ever-heightening confusion ensues.

But this is no comedy sketch—in fact, a scene like this may very well have actually played out often. Because patients do indeed need to be a little more specific when asking for “Dr. Andreoli” at Northwestern, seeing as how four different members of the Andreoli family practice there. Parents Barbara and Randall are optometrists with a combined 90 years of experience between them, while their daughter, Michelle, and son Michael are ophthalmologists. The couple also has two other sons in the medical field—Chris is an ophthalmologist in Boston, and Steven is a pediatric otolaryngologist in Jacksonville, Florida.

Michelle and Michael cite different reasons for choosing their careers in ophthalmology. Michelle enjoys the balance of procedures and medical clinical care in her practice—focusing on things like cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration screening, diabetic retinopathy, and ocular hypertension—and loves the idea of caring for patients and their families over a lifetime. Michael—who specializes in retinal surgery including ocular tumors, retinal detachment surgery, vitrectomy surgery, and macular degeneration—is fascinated by the complexity of the eye and its myriad diseases. But both children were largely drawn to the eye care field by the examples they observed everyday growing up in their Wheaton home.

Michael adds there was never any heavy-handed pressure to follow Mom and Dad into the ophthalmology field—no framed eye charts hanging around the house or mandatory vision-care pop quizzes. The inspiration instead was simply the example of two people finding happiness and satisfaction in their chosen field that eventually trickled down to their kids.

“We were encouraged to pursue careers that would make us happy and fulfilled, but our parents never pushed us to do anything specific,” Michael explains.

The kids nevertheless did indeed find their way into ophthalmology, with these four Andreolis previously having worked together in a private practice before coming to Northwestern. And while it may require some good-natured clarification at the front desk from time to time, it has developed into quite the family business.

Photos courtesy of Northwestern Medicine