My mother-in-law and I headed back to Ohio for Abigail's first sound booth hearing test this past weekend. I had tried to schedule her hearing test, gastro appt. (for the high triglycerides that popped on her original bloodwork), genetic eval and ear molds all for the same day since we were coming from Pittsburgh. Everything went very smoothly, but I am slightly confused about her hearing test results. This new test indicated that Abigail only had a mild/moderate loss rather than the initial moderately-severe loss that her ABR (Auditory Brainstem Response) test showed. While I am incredibly happy that her loss is not as bad as we had originally thought, I am a bit concerned that we are going to be programming her hearing aids to correspond to these new results. The sound booth test is different than I expected and I am not sure how accurate it is. The entire test is based on subjective interpretation of Abby's reactions to sound. I will have to do some research to put my fears at ease, but for now I am cautiously happy about these results. I can't wait to tell Ben.
Below is a picture of a standard speech audiogram--the object pictures are placed on the audiogram where their typical sound decibel would be and the letters are representative of where those sounds would be in the speech banana. I have included a picture of Abigail's first hearing test audiogram as well so that you can understand exactly what we think she is hearing right now.
The A symbols refer to Abby's aided hearing (what she hears with her hearing aids on), the circle symbols refer to what she hears unaided with her right and the X refers to what she hears unaided with her left ear. The gray shaded banana shaped area is referred to as the speech banana--where most of the sounds of our speech exist. If she is able to hear above that speech banana, she should be able to develop speech normally. As you can see her aided results put her above the speech banana and just below the highest frequency sounds of "f," "s," "th."
