There was the young woman who’d suffered an eye injury in an attack and was left with only one functioning eye. The man who had low vision due to blunt force trauma and was desperate to find ways of coping so he could work. The teenager who’d been using a pair of glasses several years old despite her sight having worsened significantly since the last time she’d been able to get an eye exam.
These are the stories of just some of the approximately 200 refugee patients a year Dr. Lisa Woo remembers seeing at the Health Sciences Optometry Clinic (HSOC) in downtown Kitchener, run by the University of Waterloo School of Optometry and Vision Science.