James goes to Audiology...

As James has been getting closer and closer to his 18 month birthday and his speech has not been improving with time- he now says 4 words, "ma-ma", "bye", "Yes", and "mine"- Xander's speech therapist has been encouraging me to get him evaluated. Part of me wanted to proceed with this evaluation so that if there was a problem we could address but there is this other part of me that has said just give it a little more time, he'll be fine! Denial is a wonderful thing. I guess I didn't want to admit that something could be wrong. I kept telling myself that he just isn't talkative b/c Xander talks for him, blah, blah, blah... Well as time has marched on and he hasn't really gained much int he way of speech, he has started to get very frustrated with us when we can't understand him so a few weeks ago I started the ball rolling for an evaluation. Step 1 check his hearing, step 2 have an official developmental evaluation.

Now usually it takes months to get an audiology appointment so imagine my surprise when they called and said we have an opening next week do you want it? Scramble to change some other things around and heck yeah! Somehow I managed to make it to the appointment hideously late, even now I am not sure how we managed to be that late..I even wore a watch that day to make sure we wouldn't be late (might have had something to do with the fact that I never wear a watch so my watch turned out to be running slow by about 15 minutes- uh oh!) but luckily they squeezed us in. So we troupe into the little booth, me, Xander and James and the testing proceeds. We had some technical difficulty in that the Winnie the pooh that is supposed to light up to give him positive reinforcement wasn't working and Xander wouldn't stop talking the whole time! but despite that she managed to get the testing done. After the booth testing we went to have a tympanogram done for which James was incredibly cooperative and Xander was totally stoked b/c it wasn't his turn this time. He kept asking if they were looking for bunnies and did they find any bunnies in James' ears (in an effort to get him to cooperate at his last tympanogram the tech asked him if she could look in his ears for bunnies...). Then we discussed the results...

James can't hear. At least not very well. He has a bilateral mild to moderate hearing loss. His tympanograms are flat and yes flat is bad. Flat means he has fluid in his ears and his ear drums aren't moving the way they should. The good news is that the cause of his hearing loss is most likely the fluid in his ears and that is fixable... with PE tubes. That means surgery and our 3rd set of tubes in 9 months! Yuck! But so as not to rush to judgement since he did have a cold the week before his exam we will go back in 6 weeks for a repeat tympanogram. Only if the repeat is still flat will they refer us to ENT with recommendation of PE tubes. So now we wait on James and prepare for Xander's repeat tubes tomorrow!