CHOP visit 6/25

Nate's home from Costa Rica! He had a great time, with quite a few interesting stories to tell. Although I wish I could have been there, I'm glad I made the decision to stay home with Lucas. I'm DEFINITELY not ready to leave him overnight yet, let alone for 9 days.

We returned from CHOP this evening. It was a relatively uneventful day. It wasn't particulary bad, and it wasn't particulary good. I just feel like we're kind of at a stand still. We only had one appointment today (compared to our usual 2 or 3) and it was with our audiologist, Erin, who we like very much, by the way. The main purpose today was to get fitted with new hearing aid molds, as we need to do that every few weeks because he outgrows the old ones so quickly. She also turned the volume up to around 100 db on the hearing aids, since we're seeing no benefit yet. We put him in a sound-proof booth to see what he would do (he sat on my lap during the test). We think that we got reactions from him at 105 db, the highest the test goes (I was wrong, before I said the test went to 120 db). That doesn't necessarily mean that he can only hear at 105, but we at least got some kind of reaction there. So I guess we can say that his hearing is between 90 and 105 (in both ears), which makes him quite profoundly deaf.

I did schedule 5 more appointments for August though - our CI info meeting, another hearing aid check (and ear mold fitting), an evaluation with speech and language pathology, an appointment to see the ENT and another with genetics. I'm trying to get as much in as possible before I return to school on August 21 - it will be much easier that way.

Our next excitement is a sedated MRI on July 3, 1 week from tomorrow. That will be lots of fun. (Some days I'm more cynical than others... today just happens to be one of those days.) I'm really just not looking forward to having him sedated. That test will probably determine his CI candidacy though, so it's quite important and also stressful at the same time, to say the least.