March is Brain Injury Awareness Month

In honor of Brain Injury Awareness Month here are all the blogs we have posted about this subject:
Concussions
Concussions Continued
Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation 

Here are two of our success stories:
My name is Adam. In 1994, when I was three years old I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. That same year I had my initial surgery, where the doctors were able to remove about 60% of the tumor. A month before the surgery a shunt was put in due to hydrocephalus (fluid buildup inside the skull) and spinal tap was performed to assess the tumor. Eight months after the first surgery, the tumor grew back twice the original size. The doctors were able to remove about 90% of the tumor at the time, the remaining 10% of the tumor had latched onto my brain.

As long as I can remember my left eye had given me trouble. It would veer out and would get worse when I was tired. This caused me to have double vision all the time.
With the double vision, I would get tired easily because of the difficulties with trying to concentrate.  I even got surgery on my left eye to try to correct the double vision, but unfortunately my double vision got worse as time went on.

This past year I was enrolled in the Traumatic Brain Injury program at Tennessee Rehabilitation Center. They referred me to Optometric Physicians of Middle Tennessee. I saw Dr. Durocher; he ran a series of tests to see what he could do to help my eyes work together. He fitted me for glasses with prisms and gave me home Vision Therapy exercises. This made my double vision go away!
Since the double vision went away I am now able to work. I am currently employed at TJ Maxx in Brentwood and I am doing very well at work. I will continue to see Dr. Durocher and his team whenever I need help with my eyes. The staff treated me so well at Dr. Durocher's office. I had a wonderful time working with Dr. Durocher. I am very thankful to Dr. Durocher and his staff for helping me. They cured one of my biggest problems, and are a great group of people.

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My name is Esmeralda. I was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia. To treat it I had a surgery called Microvascular Decompression (MVD). It is a surgical procedure that relieves abnormal compression of a cranial nerve. There was a complication with my surgery and I had a brain hemorrhage. After the brain hemorrhage I lost mobility in my right eye, had blurred vision in both eyes, and double vision.
I then started rehab and then they referred me to Dr. Durocher. He examined my eyes, he then prescribed me prism lenses and recommended I do aggressive Neuro-Optometric therapy. I started therapy with Mrs. Kate, she gave me home therapy and I started to see her weekly. She began to work hard on my eyes. After a few weeks I started using my eyes together, and didn’t see any double vision! I thank God and the help of the medical staff at Optometric Physicians. I believe that therapy is critical to recovery, and I want to thank them for all the help with my eyes. May God bless you and give you wisdom to continue to help, to those who need it most.
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It has been an honor to have had the pleasure to work with Adam and Esmeralda. It motivates me to continue to help spread the word about Vision Therapy and Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation. If you know someone who has had a Brain Injury refer them to your local optometrist.

Peripheral Stability

Since Autism Awareness month was in April, I have been doing more research on how vision is affected by the diagnosis. As you might remember in this blog,"The goals of treatment may be to help the autistic patient organize visual space and gain peripheral stability so that he or she can better attend to and appreciate central vision and gain more efficient eye coordination and visual information processing."

The main phrase that stood out to me was "peripheral stability." I emailed some fellow Vision Therapist on ways I can incorporate more fun peripheral vision exercises into our treatment.  From there I looked for articles about peripheral vision and found an article by Dr. Gallop, titled "The Peripheral Visual Awareness: The Central Issue". The article had so much great information that I thought I would share a few tidbits that helped me a lot.

"Peripheral vision is the lion’s share of vision and, is also a big part of life. It is involved with detecting and understanding the big picture – the context and changes in our environment. At least visually speaking, it helps to keep us in touch with our relationship to everything with which we share visual space. Peripheral vision is at the heart of awareness of, and response to, the total space volume of our visual environment and all its inhabitants. Without the involvement and guidance of peripheral awareness the fovea would, for the most part, be “lost in space,” not knowing where to turn."

"This may also contribute to attention problems because without sufficient peripheral awareness, the context of visual space is lost and it becomes difficult to distinguish figure from ground. The environment becomes a series of unconnected, unrelated details to be dealt with one at a time – the background is practically non-existent."

"It is important to note that the real importance of peripheral awareness is not in the receiving of information as much as is it is in the response to that information. Knowing what is in our surroundings is important in the context of action for survival. While it is certainly important to know what is going on out there, it is equally important to know what needs to be done and how to go about doing it in response to what is going on out there. Peripheral vision provides an early warning system and is what guides our movements in response."

"Peripheral vision supplies us with information about our relationship to our surroundings. It tells us where we are in relation to people, places and things in our immediate vicinity. It can provide significant information about who they are, what they are doing, and how that may affect us at that moment and in the near future. When functioning comfortably and effectively it can provide accurate information regarding size, shape, direction of movement, and even intent."

"Just as improvements achieved through vision training often transfer into improvements in areas such as problem solving, concentration and self-esteem, improvements in peripheral processing may transfer into more so-called peripheral aspects of our lives."

Our peripheral vision is not something to mess around with. It is an important for our survival! Loved this article! Next week I will gather up some great peripheral vision awareness exercises that you can do at home. 

Wii Fit

It’s new equipment time at the office again!

Our most recent VT addition might surprise you—it’s a Wii Fit!
I’m still learning all the in and outs of the new programs that the Wii provides us with here, but what from what I’ve seen so far, this is a fantastic addition to our therapy program!

Many of the Wii Fit programs emphasize the importance of balance to good vision. I’ll explain the link between the vestibular (relating to balance) and visual system in more detail in a future blog, but the key point is that there IS a relationship between the two systems. Several of the Wii activities require the player to stand on the Wii Balance Board. By shifting your weight on the board, you can move a cross on the screen. The goal is to keep that cross in the middle of a target on the screen, while performing other visual tasks at the same time. It takes practice!

Some ways that you can incorporate this same type of thing at home? Well, if you have a Wii Fit, you can do a ton of balancing games in your very own home! No Wii Fit? No problem! Things as simple as doing home exercises while standing on one foot work on the connection between the vestibular and visual systems. Balance beams at playgrounds are another way to beef up that connection—but be careful! Be sure to mix it up—you don’t want to be staring at a TV screen all day!

I’ll keep you updated as we get more into depth with all of the new features, but until then, play on!