Clearly, this is all Random… Including the author.

The summary that is too long to be a summary…

October 19th, 2008 at 8:49 pm (Hearing, Sabrina)

Lets see if I can quickly summarize the last week or so.  We had our meeting with First Steps and the therapist from CID.  We have been approved for assistance from the state of Missouri through First Steps.  This paved the way for Sabrina to get her hearing aids on Wednesday.  We have a loaner set of aids for now and CID has ordered her own set.

We went in on Wednesday, they checked her ears and checked the molds they made for her ear inserts.  Then they took out the set of loaner aids and programmed them with the information from her first visit a few weeks ago.  They put the first hearing aid in and turned it on.  The look on her face is beyond my ability to describe.  I am hoping its one of those moments that stays with me for the rest of my life.  She stopped and just… I can’t really describe it.  She… ok, I can’t describe it.  It was like a connection was made, like something entirely new happened.  We know she was hearing things before, but like things suddenly changed and she didn’t quite know what to make of it.  They put in the other hearing aid and we went back into the test booth.  Before she was hearing somewhere around 60 decibels.  Now we are probably hearing at around 20 decibels.  These are all rough guesses as we are dealing with a baby, but they seem to be accurate. 

We then sat down with our therapist.  She walked us through care and feeding of the aids and sent us home witha box-o-stuff.  Turns out there are several dozen things that need to be done each day to prepare the aids to go in and to put them away for the evening.  These devices are high tech and being high tech one of the simplest combinations of elements can be the death of them.  That combination being H2O.  We have two different drying/dehumidifying things.  One is basically silica gel that can be microwaved to dry it out after several uses so it can be used over and over again.  It changes color as it gets damp so we know when to microwave it back to dryness.  The other plugs in and drys/dehumidifies.  It has a brick of sorts that needs to be changed every few weeks and a UV light to act as a disinfectant.  We have a battery tester, a small stethoscope type thing, several other bottles and containers and air puffers and extra batteries and extra brick things and battery cases and and a CID shoulder pack and a book and… I’m sure I am missing several things.  We have definitely entered a whole new world here with a rather impressive learning curve.

Now we are home with her.  We have been able to get both aids in but the left one doesn’t seem to fit correctly.  It gets a feedback loop whenever we put it in.  The right one seems to work and fit great.  From speaking to the therapist while she is now over a year old, her first hearing day is really Thursday.  So everything that a baby would start learning the day they were born about associating sounds with concepts Sabrina started learning on Thursday.  So technically Thursday October 16th was hearing day one.

Since then she has done a pretty good job of leaving the hearing aids alone.  She pulls them out periodically, she fights us most of the time as we try and put them in, but what would you expect from a 13 month old.  We have been trying to put both of the ears on but we are more likely to just put in the right one as we are having the fitting problem with the left one.  We had called the therapist Thursday afternoon and again on Friday to ask about the problem but had not heard back.  So we figure one aid working properly is better than putting in the other one and having it squeal at her half the day.

So that’s where we are.  Behind the curve as usual but right now she has her ears out since her bath and is happily chewing on her pacifier while making ya ya ya sounds.  Nothing better than that.