August is Children’s Vision & Learning Month, and did you know that adults with undiagnosed vision problems who struggle with learning can benefit from vision therapy as well?
Difficulties while reading, working, and learning to play the cello caused this adult patient to seek a comprehensive vision exam with a developmental optometrist found with COVD’s Locate a Doctor tool. After a diagnosis of convergence insufficiency, he was prescribed glasses with prisms and a course of vision therapy. Follow his journey below as he retrains his brain and eyes to work together.
Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7
I can’t believe I’ve already been doing vision therapy for eight weeks!
Now that we’ve worked to bring my right eye closer to the same strength and skills as the left one, we’re starting to bring the two together and work on skills that are binocular, or use both eyes at once.
Remember back at my second session when I had to trace some shapes and a whole copy of it was missing because my right eye turned off while focusing up close? This time, we repeated that activity to see where I’m at now. To my surprise, without even trying anything differently, I was now able to draw the shapes on either side of the original like I was supposed to! This means my right eye is now staying “on” when I look up close and all the hard work really is achieving noticeable results!
We also did a new activity that further showed that my eyes are both on at the same time. Using just a pencil held in front of me and the trees outside, my vision therapist asked me to focus on first one, then the other. At first, I thought we would be doing something similar to the Push-up Paddle or Bullseyes from previous weeks, but it turned out to be for a slightly different purpose.
Instead, I was being asked to notice physiological diplopia, which is normal to experience when looking at something with both eyes. Because our eyes are pointing at the desired object but our line of sight continues past it, looking at something behind what we’re focused on will make that far-off thing look double. In the same way , holding something in front of what we’re focused on in the distance makes the closer object look double because each of our eyes alone are looking past that object to the one we’re focused on. It’s a little hard to explain but the pictures below might help!
Next week, instead of a regular VT session, I’ll be having a vision check with the optometrist to see how things are going. I’m really excited to see how she says I’m doing and to have more to report back about my progress!
Mindsight 