The Long Version
For years, I was a collection of disconnected symptoms.
My story did not begin with a product idea. It began with a body I could not fully trust.
After sports-related impacts, I spent years dealing with the kind of symptoms that are hard to explain when you are not visibly injured: vertigo, brain fog, eye fatigue, headaches, screen intolerance, and days where the cost of pushing too hard only appeared hours later.
The frustrating part was not that nobody cared. The frustrating part was that every path had its own narrow logic. One visit would focus on the ears. Another on the eyes. Another on sleep, stress, anxiety, allergies, infection, or fatigue. I went through tests, checkups, and theories in Morocco, France, and Canada. Some results came back normal. Some treatments helped for a while. None of it gave me a system.
I learned to live like an investigator of my own nervous system. A long coding sprint could feel fine while I was doing it, then punish me later. A hard workout could be exhilarating, then bring the vertigo back after a few hours at the laptop. A few bad nights of sleep could make balance problems feel like brain fog. Reading, video games, projected code, dry air, allergies, and visual strain all became suspects.
That is a lonely way to recover. You start collecting fragments: a medication that helped once, an audiology result that ruled something out, a physical therapist who could calm an episode, an eye exam that showed no obvious disease, a notebook full of correlations that might or might not be real.
The eye exam that changed the direction
The turning point came almost by accident. During an eye exam, an optometrist recognized the pattern I had been describing as consistent with post-concussion syndrome. It was not magic. It did not make the symptoms disappear. But it finally connected the dots: the dizziness, the visual fatigue, the brain fog, the delayed crashes after overexertion, the way screens and movement could trigger the whole system.
That moment changed the question from "what random thing is wrong with me this time?" to "what systems need to be retrained, paced, measured, and progressed?"
The healing journey that followed was less dramatic than people imagine. It was structure. Vestibular rehabilitation. Eye exercises. Learning when to push and when to back off. Paying attention to symptoms before they became a crash. Building tolerance gradually instead of treating recovery like a test of willpower.
Why I built EyeRehab
When I started improving, the software engineer in me could not ignore the obvious problem: patients are asked to do the most important part of recovery at home, between visits, with the least structure and the weakest feedback.
A paper handout cannot tell you whether your symptoms are trending up or down. It cannot remember the last five sessions. It cannot notice that you always crash after increasing intensity too quickly. It cannot turn scattered daily experience into something your clinician can actually use.
EyeRehab started as the tool I wish I had: guided vestibular and eye exercises, symptom tracking, progression guardrails, and a way to bring better data back to the people helping you recover.
It is not a replacement for doctors, optometrists, physical therapists, or vestibular specialists. The opposite is true. I built it because the right professional finally recognized the pattern, and because recovery got better when the care path became more structured.
