2nd appointment at Head and Neck

Ok, I'm all caught up on what's been going on. That brings us to our Audiologist appointment today.

I only kept Lucas awake for 2 1/2 hours today instead of 4. I think he was OVER tired last time and that's why it took so long for him to fall back asleep. I did starve the poor boy for four hours though.

We got there and went right to the room to do the ABR. We decided to put the electrodes on FIRST this time and then have my nurse him to sleep. This worked great! He passed out nursing, but when I tried to lay him down he woke back up. We decided to put him in his car seat and have Norman go up and down the stairs with him as this usually puts him to sleep. After one trip he was out!

We hooked him up and one of the electrodes wasn't reading correctly. She had to remove them and put them back on a couple times. Finally after some wiggling of the wires we got the green light and were good to go.

She started the test and this time I could see the screen. Of course it was like latin to me, I had no idea what I was looking at. Norman didn't either, and asked what we were seeing. She told us the waves we were looking at were what the nerve was showing in response to the sound being emitted into his ear. What she wanted to see were repeatable spikes which would indicate normal hearing. We weren't seeing any of that. She tested both ears and got the same response.

I had shown her my list, and asked her about it. She said she couldn't explain it, and it could just be coincidence, or that maybe I was noticing it because I was looking for it, which could definitely be.

Since he was still asleep she decided to repeat to OAE test (which tests the inner ear hairs). She got "refer" as a result that time. While she was doing this she realized she did the test with the mics in the wrong ears. She put the right ear mic in the left ear and vice versa. She didn't think it would matter that much, but wanted to repeat the test just in case. Of course at this point he was awake and hungry so I nursed him again and Norman went off to do some more exercise on the stairs to get him to sleep. She felt really bad, but everyone makes mistakes, I'd rather double check and do it right.

Norman came back up, and though I thought it would be AWESOME if we got different results, I was realistic and wasn't surprised when it came back the same.

After that we started talking about the next steps. She said she felt she could confidently say he was profoundly hard of hearing (aka deaf). She said she would contact Boston and see what they wanted us to do for the next steps. They work as a team, and she said they could do some stuff here, like genetic testing (to try to determine cause) and the CT scan (poor guy!) to make sure his cochlea would be able to receive an implant (hopefully!). She was really nice. She said she would probably be contacting us in the next day or so with our next step after she talks to boston.