Ruth has helped many people with a variety of problems. Patients were told that nothing could be done. Sometimes they think that these problems are due to other causes;
Our Mission
Ensuring that the patient journey through our practice will provide a quality experience resulting in their visual or training needs being met.
). Ruth has travelled to The Cameroon, Burkina Faso (x3), Sierra Leone (x3), Malawi (x2) with the recycled specs and has also helped to train workshop technicians and refractionists. She hopes to travel to Malawi in the Spring of 2013.
Mark joined the business from another successful independent practice in Scarborough, Pagan and McQuade after moving to support his family. Married with one grown up son, Mark’s life is governed by his not-so-well tempered dachshund, Gruber, who starts every day with a growl. Despite this Mark provides us all with a cheery attitude and keeps us all smiling.
Support is provided both to and by Rotary who support our SpecSort initiative, whereby unused spectacles and sunglasses are collected, sorted, washed, measured and placed into libaries before being despatched overseas. In 2012 RCYA supplied spectacles to Malawi via Madalitso and to the Rotary Mwanza Project in Tanzania.
Ruth has travelled to Africa (Cameroon, Burkina Faso (3) Sierra Leone (3), Malawi (3)) both to test eyes and fit spectacles, and also to provide education and training to local refractionists and nurses.
This is a poor attempt at a huge thank you for changing my life. From a very early in my life I was not confident at school and my father became increasingly frustrated with my poor school reports. All my life I felt inferior and thick’ or ‘stupid’ because I could not do the things others could. I tried my best to describe to people what was happening and that words moved and the brightness of paper hurt. I was deemed unruly and making up pathetic excuses. Thus I became a rebel!
I had been to opticians before and had been prescribed glasses but always felt that they were not doing much for me. After visiting with Ruth I left the shop feeling for the first time in my life I was not odd ‘thick’ or ‘stupid’. The glasses that I had been prescribed worked wonders for me and over the last two years have given me confidence in my work and my life. I have just had my second visit and this time Ruth has suggested tinted lenses for Meares-Irlen Syndrome, I am very excited and can’t wait to have a new pair with the tints. At last, at age 42, I can be confident that I am not ‘thick’ or ‘stupid’ and that I do have a very real issue. This will of course have a huge impact on my daily life both at work and at home.
I can highly recommend (and will) Ruth as she is a very enthusiastic person who takes great pride in her work and gives her all when helping people. She is simply a wonderful woman. Thank you Ruth and the team for changing my life.”
Then I noticed he was doing the same thing again as he did when he’d got his very first pair, the clear ones: he was noticing that he was seeing things he hadn’t realised before, details, like the little holes over the speaker part of the television, and also (I’m less happy to admit) he pointed out the wrinkles on my forehead … He even asked for a duster, because he saw some dust on the telly! This just illustrates quite how little the pair he was using before were helping him! When asked which he preferred, he was very clear this new pair was his preference.
The most wonderful confirmation of how right these are for him came at bedtime. He has a very dimmed nightlight on his bedside cabinet, yet he asked to have his glasses on to “read” his books. That has NEVER happened before.
“I am now 12 years old, and up to now life has been terrible. I have found it impossible to read. All my friends seem to manage, but for me it just doesn’t happen The words moved about and got all jumbled. People would make fun of me and call me names, I felt stupid and worthless. I was made to sit at an exam paper for 90 minutes trying to make out at least one question, but none of it made any sense to me. Frustrated attempts were making me sick and dizzy. It was affecting my health and I started having fits, bad headaches and migraines. There was a sense of hopelessness and loss. I was scared of going to school but was dragged there, often in tears, pleading ‘Please don’t make me go!’
My eyes went over the words but they would disappear and move. I honestly thought it was some magic power in me making them do this, and this made me feel like I had some supernatural powers within me and I was therefore not normal. I didn’t want to be different so I refused the Special Needs corner. I felt I was putting maximum effort in for no reward, so I lost the will to try and considered ending everything.
I came to see Ruth in April 2010 and she found some spectacles which helped to stop some of the wobble. Better still we made a reading aid out of some orange overlay and black card which has stopped the words from moving about. AT LAST!! My self confidence is returning, I am participating in sports once more – I came 11th out of 70 runners – and can feel my self confidence growing. My teachers are amazed. My mother is amazed and I feel a massive difference on the inside.
I just wanted to write and thank you now I have finished the eye training course. I came to you to learn how I could focus properly and understand my eyes better. To start with I had to learn how my eyes worked by doing the exercises you gave me to do every week. At first I thought the sessions were not working and it really was wasting my time, but eventually after practicing nearly every night or when ever I could, my eyes worked a lot better and I started to understand how I could make my eyes focus quicker, without my glasses (bifocals). At the end of the sessions I can focus quicker without using my glasses. The sessions helped my eyes learn how to look near and far with ease, walk a bug up and down the string at a speed I wanted it to go, with only me controlling it and not my eyes controlling the bug. I was able to increase my time on the flippers dramatically over the course of sessions and lastly I managed to see in to an Inter Free Space and the results were amazing. From not been able to see into one before to actually seeing one clearly was fantastic.
