Dr. Tew’s Vision and Learning Story

-I always did well in school, but I always struggled with reading. From 3rd grade to my senior year in high school no matter how hard I tried I always seemed to get a “B” in every English related class no matter. Being raised in Oldham County I know we have the best community and schools, but I did not discover why I had done so poorly with reading until I reached college. In college I knew I wanted to enter the medical field, I began taking pre-med courses and shadowed and learned about many types of medical professions. One day I had the opportunity to shadow an optometrist. Watching the Doctor do exams on children and seeing the children react to wearing glasses for the first time was amazing. I became very interested and shadowed him often. One day when all the patients were finished, he offered to do an eye exam for me. I told him I always saw 20/15 according to my childhood pediatrician, but that I had never seen an optometrist before. He replied “then you have never had a real eye exam.” He began the exam and I didn’t think much of it, after doing some test and checking my vision he began asking me some questions. ” How do you do with reading? Do you lose your place and skip or reread lines? Do you avoid of dislike reading?” After my exam and our discussion, I finally knew why I was good at school, but bad at reading. I had a vision problem. Sure, I could see better than “20/20”, but my visual system was too weak to handle reading for an extended period of time. It took me twenty years to find the help I needed to become a good reader. If you were to compare may ACT reading score ( it was horrible) with my Optometry Admission Test score (I received a perfect score!) then you would think the test was taken by two different people. Coming back to Oldham County allows me to offer services like vision therapy, that have never been available here locally before.