C-Note’s hearing fluctuated a great deal during her time using bilateral hearing aids. Whenver her hearing was down, I told C that her ear was asleep, never broken. One of the main motivators for us to pursue cochlear implant technology was to give our daughter access to consistent sounds. Ironically, the day that we activated C’s implant was the day that sound in her good ear dropped to the point where she was was no longer benefitting from her hearing aid.
While placing the hearing aid on my daughter’s head to test C’s hearing, my wife found a good amount of dried blood on the earmold. She took C-Note to the doctor at once. The pediatrician was unable to confirm whether or not the eardrum had been compromised; however, he did give us some eardrops to prevent infection. How in the world did she damage the inside of her ear?
Apparently, C was trying to wake up her ear sleeping ear with a Q-tip. She ended up brusing and scratching the inside of her ear pretty badly. The blood on the earmold of her hearing aid was just old blood from where she had placed the Q-tip. Lately she has been fascinated by opening locked doors with the end of a Q-tip, so we suspect that she broke the Q-tip in half and jammed the half with the stick in her ear.
For over 2 years, my wife and I have been advocating for AV Therapy for our daughter from the point that we learned that her hearing loss was progressive. Click HERE to read more about the AV approach.
Even though we started the AV approach with hearing aids, it seems that all the hard work is paying off.
Just one week after C’s CI Activation, her Speech-Language Pathologist e-mailed the following message to us and C-Note’s teachers:
…Here’s what Carina did today:
She identified knocking on the wall, and imitated all Ling 6 sounds at close range, and all except /s/ from 6ft.
She identified the following songs (open set): Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Where is Thumbkin, 5 Little Monkeys. She was unable to identify Open Shut Them or Mr. Sun.
She identified the following Learning to Listen sounds from a closed set of 15: dog, airplane, ghost, rabbit, slide, cow, car
She responded appropriately to “Gimme 5”, “Can I have a hug”, “What happened” , “What are you making” through audition alone ( I think there were some other phrases too, but I couldn’t write them all down as we went)
She’s doing great!…
From the tone of the note, it sounded pretty positive.
The lady who programmed C’s CI wants us to try to get from program 1 to program 4 within two weeks of activation. I think each program is progressively louder. So far, we’ve found that on the days when C’s volume is increased to the next level, she wakes up dizzy for about an hour the following day. Is this normal?
It’s easy to get caught up in ambitions to try to squeeze language into your child every waking moment. Yesterday morning, something happened that “Hit me like a ton of bricks…” and helped my family keep things in check.
Before leaving for work, C-Note started pulling on the back of my shirt and wouldn’t let me out the door. Having just sprang out of bed, she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid or CI at the time, but she had something very important to say and was determined to make sure I got the memo. She pulled me to the foot of her bed and turned my knees so that they were facing out the windor. Next, she parted the curtains and raised the blinds and looked me dead in the eye. “Daddy, will you watch the leaves fall with me, please?” Then she climbed into my lap and pulled both of my arms about her and set her head on my shoulder. I closed my eyes and pulled her close to me and we watched the leaves falls across the yard like snow.
In that brief time I wasn’t worried about making it to work on time. I was enjoying my priviledge of being a father, C-Note’s father, and hoping I never forgot this moment. “No implant, Daddy, just leaves.” she said. I nodded okay and squeezed her even tighter, while resting my chin lightly against her pretty, black hair. A little later, we said
Red was Non-Negotiable
What does Mommy sound like? “A duck,” she said, “Quack, quack, quack!”
What does Daddy sound like? “A wobot,” she said, straightening her forearms and moving them up-and-down mechanically.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that today was C-Note’s big day. She told everyone at preschool that she would be getting her implant today. The thought of being able to hear electronically never really crossed her mind as anything of importance. All that really mattered was
Until C-Note’s cochlear implant gets activated, we are relying heavily on her unaffected ear, the one with the hearing aid. We are currently using a the Phonak Exelia and having numerous problems with it. We sent one of the two HA’s to Phonak for repair about 3 weeks ago for issues related to the FM turning on-and-off. Once it came back, it made this weird synthetic noise that sounded kind of like water. Listen to this recording of the defective hearing aid chirping away in a silent room. Has anyone else encountered this problem?
"Hi. I'm Carina. What's your name?"
That's usually the first thing you hear when C-Note sees you. Her favorite past times are meeting new friends, hosting real and imaginary parties, and drawing pictures of everyone and everything, yourself included.
As C-Note's father, I stand in complete amazement of this young lady, who God has chosen to complete our family. As an adopted child with a hearing impairment, she experiences levels of joy that surpasses many who do not face similar challenges. A spunky kind of girl, she has also been affectionately nicknamed Wiggly, Jumping Jelly Bean, Wii Girl, and of course, our precious C-Note.