Words from our patients

I was in the passenger seat during a car accident on December 2017. We T-boned a van in an intersection. My body shook back and forth but the seat belt held fast and prevented a more serious injury. On that day, I attended a work meeting afterwards. I was shocked. I felt confused, but I was able to move and just thought I dodged a bullet. I thought that was it.

As the days progressed everything got more serious. I was diagnosed with whiplash and developed nausea, unbearable headaches, and dizziness. I found great support in a physiotherapist that took on my recovery for the first six months of my injury. During months of confusion, sadness, terrifying migraines, self-growth, patience, and hope, I had a soft place to fall with an amazing supportive husband, family, friends, coworkers, and my superstar physiotherapist that coached me to focus on all the positive things no matter how small they were. I remember feeling so much support at work when I met with my manager after my injury, the first thing he told me before I even tried to speak was that just because I do not have a visible cast, it did not mean that my injury was not real. I did not fall into a dark place because of the love and support I received from “my village”.

SIX MONTHS LATER – PLATEAU However, six months after my accident I felt that I had plateaued and I was no longer who I was before. My beautiful, fragile, creative brain was no longer the same. I was no longer myself. My energy levels were the same as a very old crappy cellphone: they take a long time to charge and the battery does not last long. My ability to think, to bake, to read, to socialize, to walk, to be myself was significantly compromised. Trying to be the positive, sociable me was unbearable and exhausting. Deep in my core, I knew there were precious memories of my life that were no longer there but how could I explain that to others when I did not know which ones were gone. I had grown to hate the question “how are you”.

I did my undergrad degree in biology in Colombia, a Master’s degree in Spain, a PhD degree and a post-doctoral fellowship in Canada. I had recently reached my dream of becoming Canadian, and I was working in my dream job as scientist with the federal government. All of that work, studying, scholarships, resources, sacrifices, felt useless.

I wanted to recover so badly. I fell in deep love with my brain. I stuck to my light and slow stretching routine, I quit caffeine and alcohol, and I even took up meditation with Headspace. At that point I started faking it. I knew things were seriously wrong but I needed to start faking everything and see if the power of positive thinking could bring my brain back… could bring me back. I started smiling a bit more the few times I could leave the house, and I started replying “good” to the question “how are you”, even when I knew that was not true. I could trick most people but not my family and my close friends. They knew there was something off. I was with them physically but it felt like I was in a different dimension, not being able to escape, and for as much as I wanted to come home, I just could not. If you have watched Stranger Things you may know what I mean. The hardest part of all of this was my inability to be with my husband and my twin step-sons. I remember once when my seven-year-old step-son gave a note under the dining table to my husband that said: “Make sure CS is ok”. He knew I was not. My other step-son made me a hand-drawn computer because he knew I missed work but with his computer I was not going to end up vomiting. I remember one night my husband told me “I miss my best friend”. My family missed me and I missed them. My ability to think was so difficult, slow and draining that I felt that my career as a scientist was seriously compromised. I thought maybe I could find happiness in something else. That devastated me. But I had hope that I could reinvent myself and I knew I could find happiness in my new state of mind.

Family doctors did not know what to do, and no one really knew how long it was going to take… they just advised me to move on with my life. I remember one family doctor told me I had “to get back on the horse”, that people develop migraines, and that was it. His advice came from a good place, he just did not know what else to do with my mild traumatic brain injury. I remember joking with my husband that next time I see him I was going to clearly explain that it was a car accident, not a fall from a horse.

THE NEXT STEP Around this time I happened to have an appointment with my eye doctor, who found something unusual in my eyes. He sent me to a neuro-optometrist that has recently opened a clinic in Nova Scotia and was the only one in the province doing this type of assessment. Dr. Angela Dobson did a thorough evaluation and found that the car accident caused my eyes to stop working properly. That is quite serious. Recent research has discovered that 85% of all brain processes involve the visual process in some way. I vividly remember the end of a very difficult 3+ hour assessment she said that the brain has enough neuro-plasticity to re-arrange everything back to normal using vision therapy, that this transformative process would take about six months, and that I was going to have my family, my life, and my job as a scientist back. I burst into tears because up to that point no one had been able to explain to me exactly what was wrong. She even put words and technical explanations to many of the feelings I was experiencing for so long. Dr. Dobson also advised me to see an integrative physiotherapist to help with this restorative process that involved my mind, body and soul. Together, they gave me my life back.

The first weeks of my rehabilitation were mesmerizing as memories were rebooting, just like rebooting a computer, and vivid dreams of when I was very young started surfacing in vibrant colors. I still remember how exciting it was when I started walking at a normal speed, and the world was no longer spinning in front of me, and it was no longer the inhospitable place it had become. I remember when I started feeling that my body was responding to commands from my brain, everything getting in synch, it was no longer stuck. The scariest part was that I did not know that I was “not in sync” and that I needed to be “unstuck”. I then understood that even when nothing is terribly wrong physically, we cannot properly move if our eyes are not working accurately together. My ability to visualize/project activities or upcoming events in an imaginary calendar in my head also came back.

We truly do not know what we have until is gone, and in my case, until it comes back again. My ability to visualize how to ride a bike, how to get to the library, or how to schedule events, was simply gone for a while. Now I know that is why I felt I could simply not do things. I could not “see them”. This was so opposite to the risk-taking person that I had been up to a day before the accident. As I started visualizing and projecting memories or routes of where I was going, I started being brave again. For example, I remember the first time I decided to ride my bike for three minutes and how that became the moment I realized how wrong I was thinking I was never going to be able to have my life back. I celebrated when we went on a canoe for the first time without triggering any symptoms. My speed of thinking also kept improving throughout the months. This injury awoke a scary and powerful anxiety that I have never felt before. Dr. Dobson explained to me that feeling was protecting me because my eyes were not working properly and my brain was therefore confused and in high alert. Dr. Dobson and my rehabilitation team gave me tools to help my nervous system calm down to its own pace.

SIX MONTHS – AND RECOVERY!

Six months have passed since I first went to see Dr. Dobson and everything came back. My brain came back. My personality, my dreams, my hopes are all back. I have recovered my amazing family, my friends and my job. My anxiety is gone, my migraines a thing of the past. I just needed the proper rehabilitation. We are now working on consistency and endurance, and that will take time too. This experience has made me see the world with different lenses and although it was incredibly hard and scary, it has been the most fascinating and humbling experience of my life. It is so hard to explain that, unless you experience it, you do not understand how cool and magical it is.   I am writing this because I want to reach out to those who have had a car accident, a whiplash, a concussion, or after a simple bang in the head and have not felt the same: know that it is all in your head, it is all very real, and there is hope. All the things we feel, we do, we dream, we hope, require our brain. We are our brains. It takes a lot of work to bring it all back, but it can be done.

Special thanks to my support health care team: Dr. Dobson, my rehabilitation team and Explain Pain.

I wanted to express first and foremost my gratitude for the therapy I have received from Dr Angela Dobson at Vision Sense. She is most professional and knowledgeable in her field and I am grateful I found her.

My Injury

I was in a rear end car accident July 1, 2013. Left with a TBI, whiplash and upper back issues.

With these issues I had many symptoms which are related to the TBI/concussion too numerous to mention but my vision/balance I feel were most affected. I have had issues with balance, dizziness, daily migraine type headaches, double vision, blurred vision, the feeling of not being grounded because I did not feel where I was in space normally, BPPV, tinnitus, twitching.

Reading has been so hard for me. Convergence issues, tracking issues, eyes not working together, depth perception and my binocular vision were all off. I would skip sentences, reading pages twice because nothing was going in and double vision.  My focus and concentration were always off.  I was not able to read more than a couple pages for a good 3 years because it was so overwhelming to my eyes and brain. I just could not do it. NOW I can! Thanks Angela.

Things like grocery shopping was overwhelming, sensitive to the lights, noise, being in the aisles was too much for me to process, too much stimulation. Walking I was always staggering. I was almost hit on three occasions by cars and in two of those occasions it was because my peripheral vision was compromised in the accident. I just did not see the cars until they were a few inches away from me.

I would have to say that as I know now my TBI/vision and balance would have to be at the top of the list for my injuries from my accident. In fact they were the cause of most of them.

Since my accident I have received many therapies seen many specialists.  Some helped but no one was really getting to the cause of my main issues or symptoms.

My observations of vision therapy and where I am today

I saw concussion specialist Dr Linda Ferguson, Truro in June 2014 it is here where I found hope of getting better. She is the one who directed me to see someone like Dr Angela Dobson for prisms and later vision therapy as she indicated in her prognosis. I wanted to note first I had my eyes tested in January 2014 by another Optometrist and got new prescription for my glasses but there was no mention of my convergence issues. The glasses never seemed right to me when I wore them. Which today makes sense to me as I needed the prisms and vision therapy.

This is where my story or long road to recovery really began. Dealing with the insurance company and being my own advocate to get to the right therapy was challenging. Making them understand that prism and vision therapy was as they say “medically necessary” was very hard.

My observation is that some health providers just do not get what PCS and TBI are all about.  If they do not specialize in the field of concussions and how vision can be affected then they cannot help.

The brain and eye connection go hand in hand. After a brain injury I do know now it is possible to retrain the part of the brain that controls vision and get back to what it was.

After now 40 vision therapy sessions I now understand that you must work hard at the exercises to retrain your brain to find the new paths. I learned that it must be done in a specific order to restore the vision processes that are normal.

There are no two TBI’s alike as there are no two vision issues alike. Vision therapy with a Developmental and Behavioral Optometrist is imperative, needed and necessary for so many cases such as mine.

I have learned a lot through this process. That vision problems after a concussion are very common but many people are not as fortunate as me to have found Dr Angela Dobson and get the treatment plan needed for recovery. i.e. vision therapy.

My Treatment

I have also learned that the specialized treatment plan I have gone through was the key to my recovery. I have benefited greatly and am so thankful for that. If the other health providers associated with vision problems could see hands on what a patient who is going through vision therapy experiences it would help them understand. It would be so beneficial for their patients who may be going through what I have gone through.

One must go through the therapy sessions with the guidance and expertise of someone like Dr Angela Dobson to benefit and restore their vision to where it was before the TBI.

For me I started with eye exercises which taught me to use my eyes free of the body through the full range of possible movements, to tracking exercises, to exercises to learn to control the focusing of my eyes from far and near and back again without losing your place. Further exercises were to combine movement in central space and peripheral space. Although these were just a few of the exercises that in the beginning weeks were done in order for me to get to where I am at today. Some were very hard on me and would overwhelm me but with consistent hard work they became less so over time.

For example, the Brock String exercise I have been doing now for about two months. The purpose is to give me feedback as to whether both of my eyes are turned on and pointed to the same place in space and whether perception of where a target is matches its real location. This makes me more familiar with how it feels to converge and diverge so that I have conscious control of that process. This same exercise I was given way back in my first year before I was even diagnosed with my visual issues by a balance and rehabilitation clinic. I could not do it then because my eyes could not focus, converge, diverge or any of the other things I needed to be able to do it. Now I can because I have gone through the treatment plan from Dr Angela Dobson that addressed my issues. My vision therapy provided the tools or exercises in a specific order to get me to where I am today.

The patient must work at the exercises, be patient and never give up. Vision therapy does work. I am proof of that 100%.

Concussions and TBI are finally starting to be understood more and all the issues that can come with them. Vision issues is one of them and vision therapy is key to the recovery.

Vision Sense and Dr Angela Dobson have made it possible for me to read again, comprehend and see properly. I can walk straight now and only have minimal headaches. I know vision therapy and my prisms are what got me to where I am today.

I encourage all to get the required testing if my story sounds like what you are going through from a TBI.

My nightmare began when I was hit from behind in a motor vehicle accident, the first time, in 2013. I was on my way to get a coffee with a work college, on a yield when I stopped to let a car go and was hit hard from behind.

I didn’t feel anything wrong with me the first couple of days, then I leaned over in the morning to give my boyfriend a kiss, and I heard a snap in my jaw and my life changed.

I began treatment, and over the next year I struggled with pain, crying for no reason or any reason, complete rage, and not knowing who I was. The relationship with my fiancé started to change and I felt more alone than ever. I would explain to the various treatment providers how I was feeling and finally a physiotherapist recommended that I see Dr. Mark Fletcher to confirm if I was concussive and how he could help me. After a session with Dr. Fletcher, I was indeed post concussive. I was asked to step away from work and begin treatment.

In 2015 my fiancé and I broke up and I moved out of the home we shared. I got a little better and missed being at work, so I went back. 

One Friday afternoon, I left work early to enjoy the weekend, and I was hit again by a vehicle on a yield due to the driver texting on his phone and not paying attention. The kicker, same make/model and color of the vehicle that hit me before, in the exact same situation!

Immediately I was in a lot of pain. I felt like I had never had any treatment and was back to square one. I began treatment again and had to go back off work due to the severity of the issues I was having. I could no longer comprehend data in an excel spreadsheet I was analyzing; and couldn’t keep my eyes from bouncing around when I was reading and would forget what I had read just a moment after I completed a sentence. I was so scared and didn’t know what to do or what was wrong with me. I felt like the person I was before was no longer there, and I was this void. I would cry and cry and cry and then it would turn to anger. Bright lights and sound made me extremely irritable. I couldn’t explain what was wrong with me, I just knew something was wrong. 

I started to see Jamie Turnbull at One-to-One Wellness, and after a consultation and some testing he concluded that my eyes were not moving together and that I had a concussion / brain injury. He highly recommended Dr. Angela Dobson at Vision Sense and I groaned. The amount of money I had spent seeing a variety of professionals, over the years and now I am being told that I could potentially have a brain injury….. 

I listened to Jamie Turnbull’s recommendation and began seeing Dr. Dobson. I was having a difficult time understanding concepts and remembering information, and Dr. Dobson was so patient with me. She would reassure me that I wasn’t going crazy, that I had a brain injury, and the treatment would be beneficial, and to give it a chance and not be so hard on myself. When everything else was dark, Dr. Dobson was my light. I felt isolated, no one understood what I was going through and worst of all, I couldn’t explain it to others, but Dr. Dobson understood and provided me information booklets to provide to my loved ones, so they understood the challenges that I was working through.

I won’t lie, the treatment was HARD. It was hard on me physically and emotionally, but I kept pushing through and completing the in-house treatment plan as well as the at-home treatment as recommended by Dr. Dobson.  The support I received from Dr. Dobson through this period was so amazing. If it hadn’t been for Jamie Turnbull recognizing the signs of concussive syndrome and recommending me to Dr. Dobson, I honestly don’t know where I would be today. 

One afternoon, I was driving my car home from treatment, and I started seeing colors and signs that I had not really noticed before. Because my peripheral vision was not working correctly, I had a hard time navigating turns, but that changed! I started being able to make turns confidentiality, I could drive in busy areas without panic, and I could park my Jeep! I noticed I could articulate myself without breaking down in tears and my anger was starting to subside.  I have been able to return to work full time and my reading and analytical skills have improved substantially.

I have completed my vision therapy treatment and will be working at home, building on the work we have completed together.

If you have been in a car accident and are struggling and don’t know where to turn, please go to Dr. Dobson for an assessment. I highly recommend her clinic, treatment and her staff. I am so thankful that I found hope again.

My accident happened in September 2013. I was the passenger in a vehicle that was stopped to make a left turn. We were rear-ended. The impact of the hit surprised us, but we both thought we would be fine in a few days.

I had X-rays the day of the accident, on my neck. No problems.

My own Doctor gave me medications and sent me to physiotherapy – 6-8 months. I had a neurologist appointment - no help.

My symptoms were starting to show up in different ways. Not just a headache and dizziness, but weird things that took me time to understand – was it just old age – this kept playing in my mind. My insurance company asked if I would go for a second opinion and I said “yes, anything if I can get some help”. In June of 2014 – the therapist told me that I had a concussion and should see a specialist. My doctor and insurance company never once pointed me in the right direction, even though, they were dealing with other accident victims. 

My doctor sent me for a CT scan and told me that I had lots of grey matter and that I was in my 60’s, ‘so go home – sometimes it heals and sometimes it doesn’t.

Two more years of torture – not knowing what was happening to me. My eye focus was off – made me unsteady on my feet, headaches, motion, all sorts of odd things – backing up still bothered me, neck problems. I was thinking it must be old age, but I couldn’t let my problems with my sight – go down to old age!

Finally in April of 2017 I was a concussion specialist. She in turn put me in touch with an eye specialist in Halifax – Dr. Angela Dobson, who specializes in head trauma and other specialized visual issues.

My first visit I was skeptical, but she put me though the tests explaining as she went that I definitely had a concussion and that she could help me. My husband and myself were overjoyed. We talked driving home that day that even if it didn’t help, it wouldn’t do me no harm.

It was my lucky day! I have had close to 25 visits, and I could hardly wait to present myself, as I could tell I was improving. Slowly, each visit gave me hope that maybe I was going to be healthy and happy during my old age. It would take a short novel to try to explain all that Angela has done for me. 

I am a great reader and could only read about 2-4 pages of a book after the accident. I am now reading 2-3 chapters in a session! My concentration is better, motion and movement steadier, don’t get lost in my own bedroom at night; more confident.

Thank you Angela, my husband and myself are truly indebted to you!

I am a manager of a large and dynamic team at Canada’s largest federal marine research institute. A few years ago I began struggling with my vision and associated confusion.

Vision Sense quickly diagnosed this as slight vision misalignment. Through my vision therapy plan, which served to strengthen my eye coordination and eye/brain communication, I have overcome my eye-related issues.

The vision therapy process is founded in science and documented through a series of comprehensive diagnostic eye exams that tracked my progress.

Now in middle age, I have vision and cognitive awareness that is better than in my early-20s. Once having worn glasses all the time, I now only wear glasses sparingly when reading or using a computer.

I am appreciative of this non-invasive treatment process; my success is attributed to my willingness to work with Vision Sense and to commit to my vision therapy plan. Dr. Dobson and Vision Sense have had a huge, positive impact on my overall health and well-being.

What an interesting and fascinating experience this vision therapy has been! I could never have imagined how positive the end results could be!

I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t come here. Vision therapy has changed my life.

I am thrilled and thankful to have found Dr. Dobson. I had suffered two concussions over three years and my life changed quite dramatically after the second one. When I arrived for my assessment, I felt completely defeated and was attempting to learn how to handle my new normal day-to-day existence. Everyone I had seen prior to Dr. Dobson had told me to accept the dizziness, constant nausea, and the inability to read without falling asleep or get headaches. My many symptoms had reduced me to being inactive and unable to enjoy the hobbies and lifestyle that were a part of me. I was fighting depression and trying to find other ways to feel content. Dr. Dobson’s program and my hard work have reduced all my symptoms dramatically! I am so grateful. Improvements are possible if you follow the program and do the necessary homework!

Just wanted the Doc to know, I’m seeing positive changes already...so excited. I see little parts of myself that I haven’t in 4 years, increase in energy, less fatigue, more rested and waking earlier, less headaches. I felt like I had dementia! By far, the fatigue has been debilitating daily. I’ve done more exercise and playing physically with my kids in the last week than in the last 9 months. It’s astonishing! I’m getting my ‘flash’ back (I’ve always moved very quickly with lots of energy, but that was long gone after the accident)