Tuesday 4 January 2011

Better late than never!



Well tomorrow turned out to be 4 months later. I guess I just had other things to keep me occupied. Christmas has come and gone and the new year is here. I haven't really made an new years resolutions because they never seem to work for me. We have set family goals and I have set a goal of my own for April this year to do a half marathon in aid of the NDCS.
I have just read my last entry for Oliver's progress with his hearing aids and realised I haven't really got very far. So here goes I'm going to try and get somewhere today.
I am at the point of solving problems we had when Oliver got his hearing aids. Once fitting was sorted and him actually keeping them in was solved we had to work on listening. This was harder than you may think. When Oliver was diagnosed it was strange how we adapted to being a family that hardly ever spoke to Oliver. Cruel it may sound but in our heads automatically we stopped the baby talk and chatting to him. It was going to be hard to break the mold. In supermarkets I would listen to mums talking to their babies and try it out. The first few times it actually felt strange. No idea why but it did. Oliver was quite a nosey baby. He wanted to know what was going on around him and who was around. When I held him most of the time I made sure if we were in a crowded room he would be facing outwards so he could see everyone and see what people were doing. He was more content in these positions. Little did we know then that he couldn't really hear much with his aids on, so that's why he wanted to be facing the world around him to see what was going on.
We would regularly visit the Hearing clinic at he hospital to have his molds done so he wouldn't outgrow them. This was once every two weeks. Quite intense really. I would say a lot of his baby life was spent in hospitals. He seemed to get used to the process though and was very cooperative when it came to taking new mold impression. The process went something like this. The audiologist would take his hearing aids off. Check his ear with an otoscope to make sure there was no wax blocking the ear canal then push in a tiny ball of cotton wool with a string attached to the end into his ear, called an otoblock. This prevented any of the impression material entering the canal or touching the ear drum, usually done with a small probe with a light attached to the end. The impression material was then syringed into the ear and pressed down to make a good mold and left for 5-10 minutes. Oliver was fantastic with leaving it where it was and not touching his ear. Very brave really. The impression material was then removed with the otoblock attached to the end of the mold. Job done a great impression of the inner ear for his hearing aids to fit properly. Sometimes the audiologist would have to do it twice if Oliver wriggled when she was putting the impression material in his ear. Must have felt weird really. This went on till he was about 2. Lots of parking money spent at the hospital car parks now i think about it. It's not cheap either.
As the time went on while wearing his hearing aids we could tell he wasn't hearing a lot because he wasn't listening to us. In the meantime we were still having regular visits from his teacher of the deaf. She was encouraging us to continue talking to him and playing noisy games etc. Rosemary his teacher of the deaf and I had a little joke about one day he would say "quack quack" back to us as we always played games with ducks. I couldn't see past the here and now really and couldn't imagine that, let alone what he is accomplishing now in his speech vocabulary.

1 comment:

  1. I love reading about this! Gives me a proper insight to your world and what you went through. Such a fantastic idea to write all this down as Ollie will be able to read this later on and appreciate all you guys did for him and see for himself how far he has come! XXX

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