Photo credit: France1978
I moved from Texas to North Carolina, when my daughter was almost 5 months old. It took us about a month to get settled into our new home. After we got settle it was time to begin determining what the next step was to correct my daughter’s hearing loss. Being new to the area, I found that it was difficult to find providers who specialized in advanced hearing loss, especially, since we were living in a small town. The closest specialists who were able to deal with my daughter’s stage of hearing loss were over two or more hours away from our house.
Disclosure: This post is for informational purposes and shouldn’t replace appropriate medical advice from a doctor or audiologist regarding your child’s hearing. The information that I provided was based upon my own experience with my daughter’s hearing loss and the process that I went through.
Before we moved to NC, my daughter began receiving services from Early Childhood Intervention. This is a free program that is available for children who have special needs. The goal of the program is to help assist parents with locating services and they even provide some services as well. After moving, my daughter picked up where the Early Intervention specialist left off. They began teaching my daughter sign language using play therapy. It is important that your child gets some type of language support as quickly as possible if they have a hearing loss. Your child needs to be able to communicate, whether it be using sign language, speech, or a combination of both.
I took her to see her new pediatrician so that I could get help finding the right providers so that I could pursue the next step. The pediatricians office sent her to see a local ear, nose, and throat doctor (ENT) for an evaluation. The ENT suggested that we attempt to put hearing aids on my daughter. As a mom, I was kinda annoyed with this step but for medical documentation purposes it was a necessary step. It helped doctors to determine if she was eligible for a cochlear implant. So they fitted my daughter with hearing aids, similar to the one in the photo.
To this day, I still remember how annoyed my daughter was with these hearing aids. The hearing aids were big and bulky. Not to mention, they were constantly falling off of her ears. My daughter was a pretty smart cookie, even for being just over a little over a year old, as soon as I would put the hearing aids in her ears she would immediately snatch them off. It was very difficult to make her keep them on. Besides that the hearing aids only provided her with minimal sound improvements due to the severity of her hearing loss. Her hearing aids only allowed her to hear sounds that were considered loud or very loud and she only heard a muffled version of the sound.
I continued exploring my daughter’s options and determined that she should getting a cochlear implant. In order to find out if your child is a candidate for a cochlear implant, you have to go through a series of tests, procedures, and evaluations to determine if child is a good match. It was a fairly lengthy process when we were getting her prepped to have surgery for a cochlear implant.
The first part of the evaluation, doctors wanted to try and determine what the cause of her hearing loss was. This helps them determine whether or not she is a good candidate for a cochlear implant. So the ENT, sent us to a larger hospital, which was over two hours away from where we were living, for genetic testing. Genetic testing is fairly easy and doesn’t require invasive techniques. In fact, it is done by simply drawing blood. It took a few weeks for the test results to come back. They told me that her results came back inconclusive. Thankfully, her hearing loss wasn’t caused by genetics; however, they weren’t sure what actually caused her hearing loss.
By the time we got all of the work up completed and decided to pursue the surgery, my daughter was almost 4 years old. Usually, the surgery can be done much sooner than this but it was a tough decision to make to determine if she should undergo a long surgery.
Looking back, if she had her surgery done sooner, she probably wouldn’t have the communication delays and troubles that she does today.
My daughter only received one cochlear implant because doctors felt that there was enough evidence that one implant provided children sufficient amount of hearing. Plus, doctors wanted to give the parents the opportunity to have the other side implanted at a later date, especially, if technology got more sophisticated or changed dramatically over the next few years.
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Did your young child have to wear hearing aids? If so, did they like wearing them?
