Originally Posted by "Starr"

Its been nearly 3 years now since my injury. Feb 19, 2012. Up until very recently I've had nearly no relief in any symptoms and things have been just consistently crummy all along.

Anyhow, moving along to the improvement part... finally we now have someone in town doing vision therapy and vision testing etc and I got in to be tested. Its not cheap, but its not the most expensive thing I've tried yet either.

I had the testing done and found out there's a bunch of stuff wrong with my vision. This is what it says from the report I was given:

Post-Trauma Vision Syndrome causing the following anomalies of binocular vision
a. Vergence dysfunction
b. Oculomotor dysfunction–deficits of both pursuits and saccades
c. Visual midline shift syndrome (VMSS)

For the visual midlife shift, I was prescribed prism glasses and they are pretty amazing. I've gone from needing a cane to walk to being able to walk without a cane.

I'm still not entirely steady on my feet yet, but I've only had the glasses about a week, so that's not a surprise. The big improvement is my gait. Before the glasses I had a very wide stance for balance and then as soon as I put on the glasses, I was able to bring my feet closer together, to a normal width!

In another week or two, I will resume physiotherapy with the glasses and work on balance training again. We tried it for about 1.5 years before the glasses without much improvement, so we are hopeful that maybe now we'll have some success.

The other vision issues we will try to address with vision therapy in a couple months, after we have worked on balance training for a while. Vision therapy is kinda pricey, so that part sucks, but we've already spent so much money on things that don't work and this does seem a little promising, so far.

The downside to the glasses is my headpain (which has been constant for nearly 3 years with no break!) has been much worse. I'm hoping its going to settle down again once I adjust to the glasses and my eyes and brain aren't working quite so hard.

I've been exhausted since trying the glasses, more than normal, so clearly there's "stuff" going on in there.

So its not much improvement, but its *something*... I've not used my cane in a week! The trade off is brutal head pain... I'm not sure its a good trade off yet! But when you're desperate for ANY improvement... I'm just taking what I get and hoping for the best.

Starr