This patient (and his RightEye reports) have played a huge impact on my shift into working with more concussion patients and focusing on neuro rehab as opposed to sports vision alone. In February, I met this college aged patient that had suffered a concussion from a motor vehicle accident almost a year prior. He had previously been in another city under the care of a concussion rehab doctor that did not utilize/ consider visual treatment or care. The patient walked with a lean to the side and scraped up the hallway on the way to my vision training room. He was the first patient with such poor fixation that my technicians were unable to get an autorefraction. I began my work up and immediately knew that I would want to utilize prism in order to help dampen his uncontrollable eye movements. I trialed my prisms, made my decision and used RightEye to help demonstrate both to my patient (and myself) that my choice of prism would make a big enough impact.
BEFORE
AFTER PRISM
Needless to say, we made a big impact with the prism and with showing the patient his 2nd RightEye report.
These reports are special to me because they were de-identified and used in my congressional briefing this year on Capitol Hill where we advocated for Optometry’s role in concussion care. This report gave me an objective example of exactly how we can use lenses to make an impact like no other profession. The public and other professions need to know that we can sometimes hold the key to recovery, and RightEye helps me do this on a daily basis.
MOST RECENT
The last report is from today. The patient returned to my office after breaking his glasses. He was happy, but slightly confused that he wasn’t scraping on the walls again. I explained that the prisms had helped him build a new pathway and that he wasn’t going to need the glasses anymore. He performed his RightEye testing today without the use of his glasses he once needed. The best moment for me was watching the look on his face as I brought up his results. He paused…. Then looked at me and said, “Is that mine?” “Yes, that’s you.” 😊
