Chris L. Yelp

At the end of second grade, my daughter was struggling with her reading.  She would loose her place, substitute words and pull letters from nearby words and attach them to the ones she was reading.  Third grade homework became a nightmare as we struggled through hours of frustration every night trying to get it done.  Her third grade teacher approached me about having her tested for dyslexia.  I was one step away from having the dyslexia test performed by psychologist, when someone tipped me off to vision therapy.  I was told that if a child's eye's are not tracking at the exact same speed across the page it can produce dyslexic type symptoms.   And that a child, such as my daughter, could have 20/20 vision but still have eye coordination issues.  That is when our pediatric optomestrist referred us out to Dr. Bonilla-Warford  at Bright Eyes Family Vision Care in Tampa.  The initial binocular vision  testing for eye coordination issues takes about three hours.   A few minutes after the testing started,  Dr. Bonilla discovered that we  were dealing with a classic case of eye coordination issues.  One of the things  he found was that my daughter could not cross her eyes at will.  The muscles in her right eye never developed that skill which is a very important element in reading fundamentals.  We were thrilled to hear that this was a correctible problem through a nine month vision therapy program. We learned that vision therapy is to the eye muscles  as physical therapy is to your body's muscles.  We started immediately in November of 2008.  Her progress has been breathtaking.  The therapy teaches her to now sense when her eyes are fighting each other and how to make them work together.  She went from not wanting to pick up a book and read to coming home with 100% on her reading tests.  Dr. Bonilla-Warford is so passionate about this program and helping his patients succeed.  The staff is so friendly and they really do go out of their way to make the therapy a lot of fun.  The therapy program not only strengthens the eyes it also works on helping the patient build their visual confidence and memory to help them succeed.  I cannot imagine where we would be today had we not found Dr. Bonilla. Through his dedication and care, my daughter's world is now an open book.Sincerely,