1st Audiologist Appointment at Head and Neck Surgical

We took Lucas to his appointment with the new Audiologist when he was around 6 weeks old. For this we had to keep him awake and hungry for FOUR hours before his appointment. His appointment was 8am. They do this in the hopes that once you get there, you can feed the baby and they will pass right out, as they need them to be completely asleep for the tests. I felt like such a mean mommy! For the first couple of hours he was awake because I kept him up after his normal 4am feeding, but after that he was not a happy guy. He kept falling asleep in the car on the way in, and I was having a heck of a time keeping him awake!

We got there and we repeated the tests that were done at Northeast Hearing. She got the same "pass"/"refer" results. He was also nursing while she did the tests. He passed right out when he was done, but we had to move to another room for the next test. Then, when we got in there she had to clean his forhead and temples with alchohol wipes and then this little abrasive strips to ensure good contact with the electrodes. Of course this woke him right up and it took us a good 30 minutes to get him back to sleep! Finally I was able to get him to sleep on my chest again.

She placed two electrodes in the middle of his forehead above his nose, and one in front of each ear. Then she tested each ear one at a time with a small microphone she placed into his ears. I could hear some of the sounds, it was a bunch of clicking, whereas at Northeast it was more high pitched beeping. She tested him up to 85 decibles. After the test was done she told us she was not getting the response she would get from a normal hearing baby, and that based off the results of the test he has a severe to profound loss in both ears. She asked us if we were surprised by that result, and I told her not completely since he had had three tests he had failed so far (he did the hearing screen in the hospital twice), but that we had seen him respond to some sounds, so we didn't think his loss would be that severe. We had seen him jump when Noah shrieked, a door was slammed, and a chair was dragged across tile floor since our last appointment with Northeast.

That test was on a tuesday, and she made us an appointment to talk to the ENT doctor that Friday about the results and our options. She said we most likely would be going to Boston for further testing, and mentioned the possibility of Cochlear Implants to us.

I left feeling bummed out. I thought he probably had a loss because three responses in 4 weeks aren't great odds, but I was hoping it was on a more moderate scale. Still, I was glad it wasn't something worse. I went home and started looking up resources for deaf children and their families in the state of Maine and was very pleasantly surprised by home much we have available to us.