StemCell Therapy

Maurice DeMay practices eye exercises as part of his recovery (WHAM photo)

For people who've gone partially blind after a stroke, a local scientist is helping patients re-train their brain to see again.

As black dots on the right side of his computer screen wiggle, Maurice DeMay focuses on the steady, small black dot in the middle of the screen.

You gotta concentrate on the center dot, and that's the hard part sometimes, is focusing on that dot, DeMay explained.

He presses the arrows on the keypad for each set of moving black dots.

Left or right. Whatever the stimulus is doing. It could be going up or down, could be going sideways, he said.

A beep tells him if he's correct. We do this, 300 times at a time. I'm doing pretty good right now," he said.

A stroke stole his vision. Five years of eye therapy is starting to bring it back.

It was devastating when it happened. I'm blind on my right side, he continued.

When DeMay first started Dr. Krystel Huxlin's therapy, he could only see half of these moving dots.

Dr. Huxlin says DeMay's eyes and parts of the brain that handle vision were still working. It was just a matter of re-training them.

We are trying to make the blind parts of the visual field see again, Dr. Huxlin said. Which means we have to present a visual stimulus to the blind parts of the visual field and ask the person to tell us what that stimulus is doing.

After five years, Maurice is literally seeing results.

I made up my mind when I started the program, I was going to follow through with it and do the best I could, DeMay said.

Today, he sees the dots move in the correct direction, almost 100% of the time. But he still has some frustrating moments with his blind spots.

I'll set something down," he said. "I'll be working on it, then I can't find it, because it might be over to my right side, and I'll be looking in my blind spot. After a while you forget you have this blind field.

I've learned to accept it, he continued. "By accepting it, you learn to work with what you have and enjoy what you have, and I do. I enjoy what sight I have left, and I'm gonna make the best of it. We're quite fragile, and I do not to take everything for granted anymore.

More:
Eye therapy gives sight back to stroke survivors - 13WHAM-TV

This entry was posted on May 7, 2017 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Eye Sight & Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |