Nana accompanied us to this appointment, which was nice - good for her to see what happens, and handy to have someone to hold Kaelen when i needed to sign papers or do other things. :-) I didn't realise that Kaelen needed to be asleep for the testing though, so we were there at a time when he was fairly awake after a feed. Fortunately, he's a sleep-anywhere kid, and by the time they were wanting to begin the testing it was getting close to his sleep-time anyway, so they set us up in the sound booth (all testing is done in sound-proof rooms so prevent extraneous noise from interfering) and left us for 10mins to get him to sleep. He was a bit wiggly, both tired-wiggly & tummy-wiggly so after a few mins i put him over my knee to ease the tummy pains...and he was soon fast asleep :-) Lucky i never had to do this infant test with Jarrah, there is *no way* he would have done that...
The testing showed a 50-60db hearing loss, which is exactly what we expected, so then it was on to choosing colours for his behind-the-ear unit and making impressions of his ears for the molds. I had wondered about getting a different colour unit to Jarrah so i could tell them apart easily, but in the end i just went with the skin-colour again, and we'll put stickers or nail-polish or something on them to tell them apart (might even put their initial on the unit so that Jarrah can tell which is his and which is Kaelen's too...just thought of that!). Impressions are taken by squirting a nice cold goo into the ear canal and around the outer ear which then needs to be left to set for about 2minutes - an eternity to a small child! - so that wasn't entirely pleasant, but it's got to be done. Oh, and because Kaelen's so much smaller than Jarrah was at this point, we'll be needing to get new molds as he grows, which will probably be a much more regular event :-s Great...
So, back to Australian Hearing on Tues 30th Sept for hearing aid fitting, then a follow-up appointment on Tues 14th Oct to check and make sure they're doing ok. On 1st Oct Kaelen turns 3 months old, so he'll have good access to sound a lot earlier than Jarrah did - hopefully this will mean we can avoid some of the speech delays and discipline issues we've had with Jarrah along the way...although i think it will be more difficult seeing hearing aids on my baby's ears this time, he's so little...
A side-note, humourous but totally irrelevant - i got my wedding rings re-sized last week, as i hadn't been able to wear them since Jan 2006 while i was pregnant with Jarrah. After he was born i took a while to lose all the baby weight, but even when i had i found that my knuckles had spread a bit and i still couldn't get my rings on! Since we were thinking of having another baby fairly soon i didn't bother about getting them re-sized at the time, but this time i thought i would since i'm not carrying much extra weight. They were a size J, and they only needed to be made one size bigger, up to a size K - who would have thought that my kids would be imprinted in my ring sizes?!? :-)
Next appt: Tues 30th Sept 10:30am Australian Hearing - Kaelen's hearing aid fitting
No comments:
Post a Comment