Macie’s Mom explains how vision therapy helped Macie’s academics, confidence and her relationships at home.
FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Question: “What were Macie’s signs and symptoms?”
Macie’s Mom: Some of the signs for Macie, well one when we started to put her in a private school and we had her tested her headmaster said that there was really something that was not right. And she has a twin. And the twin was always ahead and could do things that she couldn’t do. But I just figured it was a developmental thing. She never began to read. She was constantly frustrated. None of her work came home complete in Kindergarten. Not one paper, the whole year. Any time we sat down to do homework she didn’t want to do it. She was hungry. She was tired. IF she did do it, she would rub her eyes, they would water. She would yawn, and she would fuss the whole way through.
Question: “What made OCVT special to you and Macie?”
MM: Macie loves coming to therapy every week. Miss Annie has been amazing. She just… Macie feels so successful when she’s here. And she feels successful when she’s at home. And she does great therapy at home. I think she would do even better if Miss Annie would just come to our house and do that with us too! We do well at home. She has just persevered. All of the testing has helped us every 6-8 weeks. All of that testing has helped us to know where we’re at, and where we’re going, and what we’re looking for. Any time I come in Miss Annie says, “So, what’s going on at school? What are we working on?” And I’ll tell her, and she’ll have an activity for that. When we were having a hard time with addition, she gave me all sorts of addition. Well just in the beginning we couldn’t even count to 20. So, she went from not being able to count to 20 to doing double addition math facts. And she couldn’t count backwards from 20. She couldn’t count by two. She couldn’t count by fives. And everything that we were working on at school, Miss Annie had an activity for, and it just pushed us forward so quickly.
Question: “What changes have you seen?”
MM: So, within eight weeks we started seeing that her eyes were working. And we found out that she was teachable. As time went on, she became less frustrated. She could do her homework. She went from not reading at all to reading at a second-grade level. So, she failed Kindergarten. We put her in first and she has functioned greatly at the first-grade level. It’s not that it’s not been difficult because she was behind. But she is staying caught up. And I really feel like once second grade starts, she’s going to be starting just like every other kid. She has such endurance now. She has such perseverance. She believes that she can do anything. She has recognized that all the things she couldn’t do in Kindergarten that she can do now, she has recognized that she can learn. She knows that she can do anything that’s asked of her as long as she pays attention. I can ask her to do three things at a time like, “Go put your pajamas on and brush your teeth and go to the bathroom. Get ready for bed.” She can do all of those things now where usually she would get to the stairs and be like, “What was I doing? Where am I going?” She’s reading. She’s doing math. She’s doing amazing. She’s no longer frustrated. She’s very loving. We’ll be sitting and doing therapy and she’ll just look up at me and be like, “I love you, Mom.” It’s like she knows she’s being healed, and she recognizes that. It’s been such a sweet bonding experience for us. Although it’s a lot of work, it’s rewarding work. And it’s so worth every week of therapy we’ve done
