Left-Sided Homonymous Heianopi A Case Study

The case study presents Jessie as a healthy woman with no history of medical issues. However on her 50th birthday, Jessie begins to express unusual behaviours. Jessie hit the left side of the garage with her car, and failed to blow out the left side of the candles on her birthday cake. After each incident, Jessie offers up a plausible reason for the unusual behaviour. Jessie is found lying on the bathroom floor unaware of her surroundings and incontinent, leading her to consult a neurologists. Neurologists diagnosed Jessie with left-sided homonymous hemianopia and sensory loss in her left arm. Left-sided homonymous hemianopia refers to the lack of perception of visual information from the left visual field. This deficit has been characterized as resulting from damage in a brain region beyond the optic chiasm, but before the primary visual cortex (Goodwin, 2014).
Afterwards, Jessie demonstrated excellent verbal skills on the National Adult Reading Test (NART) and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R), however she struggled with many of the non-verbal sections. Jessie was unable to redraw pictures in their entirety, failing to draw the left side. Moreover, Jessie interacts with individuals more pleasantly when approached from her right side. Jessie also refers to her left arm as a “hunk of meat”, which she fails to use despite having any motor problems. The case study does not specify how the damage may have occurred, however the impairment was likely caused by a stroke, rather than damage that could have occurred during the surgical removal of the tumor. One reason for this is because Jessie was found on the floor and unaware of her surroundings, and lack of awareness is a common symptom in stroke patients (American Heart Association,