8-14-14 Visual Therapy Graduation and First Day of School!

Finally 8 months after her diagnosis, Sarah graduated from visual therapy yesterday!  When we went to the eye doctor on Monday, she said Sarah testing so far looked really good, her numbers all look really good, and that she would finish up her testing this week, and get her home maintenance schedule next week, then we would be done!  Instead of taking 30 sessions, I believe it only took 23, so that is huge.  She still has homework she has to do 3 times per week for the next 3 months.  And she still needs to patch her dominant eye 30 minutes/day until next week.  Then she will have the last follow up with the eye doctor in November to make sure everything is still going well.  At that point, she will be able to go back to yearly appointments!  We were happy with that.  (The doctor said that given all of Sarah's issues, she really didn't think she would be able to correct everything.  She just wanted to train her brain not to suppress that eye.  But she was able to do even more.) AND even better!  She finished her testing quickly on Wednesday and the therapist had time to give us our home maintenance.  So Sarah graduated and is done with the in-office sessions!  Yay!

She has had some HUGE improvements!  After her testing on December 31, we received a letter with her results.  Bear with me because this will get really long and involved, but there are several people interested in all of this.  If you aren't, feel free to skip to the first day of school pictures.

The letter that the doctor wrote said (I will summarize parts and quote parts) that Sarah has amblyopia (or lazy eye), and because her prescription was so much worse in the right eye, her brain did not use any imput from the right eye at all ~ it suppressed it.  (For example, they did an exercise where she would look through a machine and copy with her left hand what she saw with her left eye, and with her right hand what she saw with her right eye.  Her left hand drew a complete snowman.  Her right hand drew two lines.)  She also wrote "A poorly functioning system gives Sarah poor depth perception and difficulties with judging distances and sizes, poor accuracy for eye motor skills with eye pointing accuracy.  Her brain cannot focus and point her eyes together as a team.  Glasses will improve her overall vision at both distance and near; however, because of the great prescription in her right eye, it has not developed good acuity.  That means it cannot see as well as the left, even with glasses on."

Sarah had a very difficult time  trying to do the Developmental Eye Movement Test, which tests her tracking ability.  She was unable to do this test as she became too lost to finish the horizontal portion of the test.  However, she was able to complete the vertical portion of the test.  This is how quickly she can see the number, perceive the number, and say the number.  She scored on her age and grade level.  These results indicate a tracking problem.  Children with tracking difficulties often complain of skipping words or lines, re-reading and loss of place."  This explained well why she was struggling with reading, even though she knew how to read.

They retested her on all of the issues that she was having, and she made huge improvements.  In December, they tested her at the 2nd grade level.  This week, they tested her at the 5th grade level.

Visual Determination (the ability to discriminate the difference between figural units such as letters.  Difficulties in this area may cause misreading of words that have the same or similar beginnings or endings.  The child may also make errors when copying from the blackboard to the paper.)  Sarah went from 25% at the 2nd grade level to 75% at the 5th grade level.

Visual Memory and sequential memory She actually dropped significantly, but they think she was just having a squirrely day.  When she had to do exercises for homework and in therapy sessions with this, she did outstanding.

Visual Spatial Relationships & Visual closure (frequently show up in reading as substituting similar words like make for made.  The child may not scan an entire word from the first letter to the last when they read.  In other words, they only look at part of a word and then make a guess at the entire word.  This shows up in both phonetic and flash-known recognition skills.)  Visual Spatial Relationships Sarah went from 63% at 2nd grade level to greater than 99% at the 5th grade level.  Visual Closure Sarah went from 16% at 2nd grade level to 50% at the 5th grade level.

Visual Figure Ground (The ability to separate the important objects from the background of unimportant  extra material.  i.e. hidden pictures)   Sarah scored at greater than 99%.

Visual Form Consistency (Tests the ability to identify similar figures presented in different size, pattern or direction.  i.e. an A is an A even if it is up-side-down or a different size or color). Sarah went from 5% to 99%.

Developmental Eye Movement Test (see the paragraph on the Developmental Eye Movement Test in the letter to see what this is about)
Vertical - age on 12/31/13 at 2nd grade level she was at 80%.  Now at the 5th grade level she is at 93%.
Vertical - grade 12/31/13 at 2nd grade level she was at 55%.  Now at the 5th grade level she is at 96%.

On 12/31/13, they were not able to score her at all for the horizontal testing because she couldn't focus her eyes together to complete it.  Now at the 5th grade level she was scoring 45 and 60%, which is HUGE!

Word Sentence Copy she went from 30 letters per minute and struggling with spacing to 56 letters per minute which is well above normal. 

They also screened her for dyslexia.  Not because they thought she had it, but because they wanted to see how she handled language.  In December, Sarah placed at the 2nd grade level, borderline normal on word recognition, and normal on the phonetic portion of the test.  NOW, at the 5th grade level she scored normal for the word recognition and above normal on the phonetic portion of the test.


These pictures are Sarah with her visual therapist, and Sarah with her certificate when she graduated yesterday.  We are so thankful that this was so successful, and for all of Tambry and Dr. Price's hard work!

 

 

 

This week is not infusion week for Sarah, but she is still feeling really good.  She had her first soccer practice on Tuesday, and she has her first game on Saturday.  She has an appointment Monday with the asthma/allergy/immunology doctor.

 

Today was the first day of 3rd grade.  She is very excited to see what this year holds!  She even has her zebra backpack this year!

 



Her teacher is Miss Johnson, and Sarah loves her.

Her brothers and sister started school today too.  Joshua is in 8th grade, Zachary is in 6th, and Anna is in preschool.

Thank you for your continued prayers for her.  God is truly faithful in what He is doing for our family.