Opto-mize Ebook: Chapter 4 Concussion and Head Injury

Chapter 4 Concussion and Head Injury:
Concussion, Brain Injury, Vision Therapy, Concussion Treatment, and more.
Learn about how vision is impacted by concussion and how it can be treated.
"The day Todd decided to head north to open the cabin was sunny and clear. He had just come back from two weeks in Mexico and was looking ahead to a summer of kayaking, water skiing and fishing. He also had some trials motorcycling events lined up and a few hikes in mind. He was an assistant fire chief, and like many in the profession, he liked to keep active.
That all changed about an hour into his trip, when a one-ton truck plowed into him full speed from behind while Todd was stopped at a red light. The impact tore the back wheels off the axle, and the truck bed folded into an accordion. Somehow, miraculously, Todd stepped unbroken from the wreck.
“Next thing I knew, I was standing in the middle of the road,” he says. Police, ambulance and fire trucks all rushed to the scene. Todd thought he was okay, so he asked to be dropped off at a friend’s cottage nearby, and the first responders obliged. But not long after, it felt like everything started closing in on him. His buddy drove him to the hospital back in town, where they checked him over and sent him home again. But he was back the next morning with excruciating pain in his head, neck, shoulder and lower back. More worrisome, he couldn’t think straight and was losing his ability to speak. “Everything tanked,” he recalls.
That was just the beginning. Todd fought to retain a foothold in his former life, as his condition got worse and worse. “It was almost like a stroke,” he says. There was numbness and tingling down his left side, and his speech was slurred. He stuttered. He shook. His short-term memory was shot.
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CHAPTER 4: CONCUSSION AND HEAD INJURY
CHAPTER 4: CONCUSSION AND HEAD INJURY
Not only was water skiing and trials motorcycling out of the question, the 48-year-old found he could no longer even walk. “For the longest time, I would just stand there. I would try to walk, but I could not figure out how to do it.”
His vision was a mess too. He was extremely light-sensitive and couldn’t focus on anything - not a book, not a newspaper, not a friend’s face. Any- thing with motion made him dizzy and nauseous. When he could finally bring himself to look at a TV screen, all he could watch was a channel that showed still shots of photography from around the world. “It was all I could do for six or eight months.”
“I was in a really bad place,” he says. He cried a lot, something he’d never done much before. Things that used to be so simple now seemed impossi- ble. “I’m a smart guy. I’ve run companies. I was assistant chief,” Todd says. “This rattled me pretty good.”
I still remember the first day I saw Todd. He walked into the office like he was drunk, but he wasn’t. His speech was slurred too. He had trouble answer- ing even simple questions. He was really, really messed up.
He said he saw one-and-a-half of everything, like when you push really hard on one of your eyeballs. He described his visual world as being “kicked” - as in kicked off to the side.
A lot of the assessment exam was hard to do. But I got enough to tell that his eyes weren’t tracking and weren’t working together, and his perception of depth, space and midline were just totally off.
That day I was able to find some glasses to help him - they took the edge off some of this - but I knew what he really needed was full vision therapy. To be honest, I had no idea how we were going to get that accomplished, because Todd was really struggling. He cried in the chair three or four times that first day. I didn’t even know whether I’d be able to get him back into the office.
It broke my heart.
I went home that night wondering if I should call the guys at the fire hall. I know a lot of firefighters and they’re pretty tight. But I didn’t want to breach his privacy. Should I talk to his dad? He was the one who’d brought Todd to the appointment and was having to drive him around. I wasn’t sure what to do - so in the end, I just waited.
It was a few months before Todd turned up at my office again. Emotion- ally, he was in a better place by then, but he was still the most severe head injury patient I’d had up to that point. A lot of his buddies thought he’d never get back to work again, but I had this weird blind faith that he would.
"