hearing update

Today was a big day for both the kids hearing-wise. Carter had his yearly Early Childhood Intervention Services evaluation and his scores were suprisingly optimistic. They not only assess his communition skills but the rest of his development as well. He scores right at age level (almost 24 months) for cognitive, social and adaptive skills, but he has the physical abilities of a 32 month old. I knew he was active, but geez. And in communitcation he scores at 20-22 months for both receptive and expressive language skills. For a kid with moderate/severe hearing loss that doesn't wear his hearing aids all the time he's doing awesome. Now imagine how much he'd catch up if only we'd make him wear his HAs all the time!

THEN this afternoon we had a cochlear implant consultation with Abby's ENT/CI surgeon. She has what they call a left corner audiogram in her left ear, meaning she only has useful hearing in the lower (500hz) range and the rest of her hearing is in the severe to profound range. Because she still has some hearing in that ear however, makes her a tricky candidate for a cochlear implant. Based on her booth testing (she's getting like 40% accuracy in her left ear) Dr. Bauer definitely feels like she would benefit from a CI and wants to proceed with getting approval from the insurance company IF we feel like that's what we want to do. There are pros and cons to doing it now vs. waiting for her hearing to get worse and we haven't quite decided how we feel about everything. Of course, she still has a good right ear (by insurance company standards), and because of that they could deny her and that would make the decision for us, so we'll see.

If we decide to implant Abby, and the insurance company approves the surgery, we would get it done this summer. WOW. This is a really big decision and one that is going to take a lot of prayer.