First Improvement In Nearly 3 Years
 

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

Great news. Prisms can be difficult to adjust to. I had a terrible time for months - discovered the opticians made mistakes with the prisms and they were all backwArds!!!
I still have difficulty with prolonged reading but prisms sure do help.
Good luck and best wishes for continued healing. It is a long road, isn't it?!!!

Hi Starr,
Congratulations on your achievements. I remember when I was reading your entries long ago. My daughter also has prism glasses and they have allowed her to read.

Keep us updated

Starr,

I just passed my one year anniversary of sustaining a concussion and I continue to suffer. As such, I continue to research what can be done to try and get better. I recently saw an occupational therapist and he conducted a test on me which showed that I had a visual midline shift. So I started looking into VMSS and came across your post. I was wonderin whether you could tell which optometrist you saw that had prescribed the prism glasses?
One treatment process that seemed to help a bit was a visit to a Dr. Lawrence who is a functional neurologist here in the Ottawa area. He is expensive but I did see some progress.

Thanks,

Tim

Tim,

Welcome to NeuroTalk. Starr checks in occasionally so it may be a while before you hear from her. You should be able to get a prism correction assessment from a behavioral optometrist. I would be surprised if Dr Lawrence cannot refer you to a good behavioral optometrist. Have you asked his office ?

How are you doing ? What are you primary ongoing struggles ?

Tim,
I am in your area, I see Dr. Wareham. He has just opened in Ottawa in the past year or two. I know there is a wait list. I have prisms and have had 30 weeks of vision therapy with some results. Google him. I believe it is called Achieve Vision therapy. I highly recommend him.
Hope that is helpful.