Avocado

Because some things are too cute not to share.... James is doing very well with his speech as you can see- so well in fact that he will most likely be discharged from early intervention in the next few weeks. He had his six month review last week and he would have been discharged then except that he has a hearing test scheduled next week. We thought we would wait and make sure his hearing continues to be in the normal range before dicharging him. Especially given the nasty ear infection he has going on it seemed prudent to make sure his hearing was still normal. His ear has finally started to clean up after 5 days of antibiotics and he is back to his impish self!

I have slightly mixed feelings about all this- I am extremely thankful that his hearing has been within normal range and that his speech is so dramatically improved but I still question whether the ear tubes were really the right decidion to have made- for both the boys. I can't help but wonder how having MRSA in their ears in going to affect them in the long term and the need for so many antibiotics worries me as well. What happens when or if the sulfa antibiotics no longer work? We have to move onto IV or IM antibiotics- one of which is gentamicin which can be ototoxic in children. The reality is they may have gotten MRSA anyway but at least if they hadn't had tubes then it wouldn't have penetrated their ear drums. But if they hadn't had the tubes and the hearing loss continued it could have become permanent or it would have significantly delayed their speech which could have in turn delayed other things. So which is the lesser of 2 evils? I think this is a dilemna that as a parent you face all the time. We have to make decisions for our children that are potentially going to affect them for the rest of their lives and sometimes those decisions are less clear than we would like. I have to believe that we made the right decision at the time with the information that we had- who knew both boys would develop a very rare complication that would lead to continued ear infections- but hindsight is always 20/20.

That being said I guess I better make sure that James is really on the waitlist for pre-school next year!