A sunny day in Philadelphia

I really wasn't looking forward to our visit to CHOP yesterday. I mean, the stress certainly isn't what it was last year at this time, but I just didn't want to go to Lucas's speech evaluation. He's making good progress, but I was afraid it wouldn't be up to par. But, it was "a sunny day in Philadelphia" like the post title reads. Not only was it 90 degrees and sunny, but it was a good visit.

He performed pretty well for the speech therapist, surprisingly. If there's one thing Lucas doesn't do well, it's perform on command, especially with vocalizing. At last month's eval, I came home with the goal for him to imitate 2 different vocal lengths. He doesn't really do that for me. I mean, he produces different vocal lengths, but not when prompted. Anyway, he did for her! So that was exciting! She sees it at least as an emerging skill, so we'll take that! She was also excited that we were able to make a list of 14 spoken words that he responds to receptively. Receptive language must come before spoken language, and we're definitely on our way there!!! It was quite clear to all of us (my mom came along too!), that he's made a lot of progress in the last month.

Here are some other things that he did for her:

1. He waved bye-bye when she said "wave bye-bye" (without waving herself)

2. He turned and looked at me two separate times, when she asked him to give an object to "mommy"

3. He began to pick up on the difference between "brush, brush, brush" and "mmmmm" when she used a toothbrush and a cookie with a Mickey Mouse doll

4. He responded quickly and consistently to all the Ling sounds

Then we met with audiology. He gave Lucas a new program, to see if we can increase his access to more soft sounds. He was responding in the booth again to spoken language at 25 dB. I also asked him to test Lucas's non-implanted ear for a hearing aid re-evaluation. It was very interesting that Lucas responded at 85 dB at 500 Hz (a lower frequency) and at 110 dB at the higher frequencies. He never did that before, ever. His responses were still consistent with severe-profound SNHL, but a bit better than previously noted. So... we're going to really try going bimodal (one CI, one HA). Nothing to lose! Just waiting to hear back about how to go about getting the HA through medical assistance. Lucas's other pair of HAs were loaners.

And... I requested copies of all of his records, so that we can actively seek that second opinion. I'm not giving up on the second implant yet!

Yes, it was a sunny day in Philadelphia!