Dr. Jason Persoff has logged over 4,000 miles chasing storms, and he says it’s a spiritual experience. He never expected his hobby to reconnect him with his passion for medicine. In his normal life, Persoff is an internist at University of Colorado Hospital in Denver, where he treats patients who have smoked too much marijuana , among other daily duties. But every spring, he packs his camera and follows storms around the United States. Persoff’s two worlds collided in on May 22, 2011. Persoff was chasing storms outside of Joplin, Missouri, when the weather took a dramatic turn. Early in the day, the storms forming around Joplin were fairly mild. Then “suddenly, out of nowhere, this beast of a storm formed just west of Joplin, and morphed into the deadliest tornado in US history in the past fifty years, in a very, very quick fashion,” Persoff remembers. He was giving it a wide berth, tracking the storm on radar and following it from behind, hoping for a good view from a safe distance.