Some help, maybe

Elliot has hearing issues.

We realized it when he was in Kindergarten. I received a note in the mail saying that he'd failed the hearing screening at school. I sort of shrugged it off, figured it was nothing. He failed the screening again next year and I figured I should probably take him to a doctor. So off we went.

The audiologist in town said that he had a severe hearing loss and required a hearing aid. We were dumbfounded. How could our kid have such a severe loss that he needed a hearing aid and we didn't even know it. Nice attentive parents, huh?

At the time of that testing Elliot happened to also have an ear infection. We were told that we needed to clear that up for the proper fitting of his new appliance but that taking care of the infection would not change the fact that he needed an aid.

Hubby was beside himself. I wasn't quite as upset, I just wanted Elliot to be able to hear. But we both had reservations of our kid having to go through life with this handicap. We know how cruel kids can be. It scared us to death.

The night before Elliot's next checkup Hubby prayed and prayed. In fact, he fasted the day before. He prayed that God would heal him and make it known that He had taken care of it. We went in the next day for the screening and the audiologist called us back with a dumbfounded look on her face. Elliot can hear, she told us. Not great, but not so bad now that he was even a candidate for amplification. She had no medical reason as to why this happened. Couldn't explain it. Wow.

The next year Elliot passed the hearing screening at school. However, last year he failed again. When I took him back to see the audiologist here in town she got such a completely different result that she referred us to a specialist in another town.

So that's where we've gone for a little over a year now. I should mention that Elliot has also had some fainting spells and often suffers from nausea for no apparent reason. In an attempt to find some sort of correlation between all these ailments poor little Elliot has been put through the ringer with tests. ABR's, MRI's, CT Scan's, EEG's, EKG's, 3 hour glucose tests, etc, etc, etc. Everything is always normal.

In the last several months we've been treating his progressive hearing loss with a diuretic and low sodium diet because the doctor thought he had Cochlear Hydrops. However, it hasn't seemed to help and at his checkup today his hearing in his right ear was down once again. Thankfully, his left ear is in the normal range. It's the low end of the normal range but normal nonetheless. At the rate his right ear is going though, he'll likely be completely deaf by the time he reaches high school.

So all this background information on his condition is just to say that it looks like we might now have a "fix". It's so obvious to us now that he can't hear. We'll say something and he'll repeat something back to us that isn't even close to what we said. He struggles with hearing us and it's painful to watch. He needs a hearing aid. However, because of the type of hearing loss he has a normal hearing aid will only amplify the mumbled words he hears. Like he needs louder nonsense going in his head. What this means is that he needs one of two things.

One is a cross reference hearing aid. That means an aid in each ear. One acts as a speaker that throws the right sounds over to the good ear. It's not always very clear though and many patients with this type of loss have had complaints about it.

The other option is BAHA, or bone anchored hearing aid. This is what we think we'll do. It's a small titanium implant that is put into his head behind his ear. Sound is transferred through the bone of the skull, stimulating the cochlea in the hearing ear. Then the brain can distinguish between the sound that it receives from the deaf side via the BAHA system, from the sound that it receives directly from the hearing ear. Apparently, the end result is the sensation of hearing from the deaf side.

Wow. Kind of a big deal huh. But wouldn't it be great if he could hear. And he didn't feel like he was always being a pain saying, "What did you say?"