Abby's Second ABR Results

The day started out rough--we had a terrible storm the night before and the roads were very foggy in the morning. The kids were packed and we were ready to head out at about 7 am. Abigail wasn't allowed to have anything at all after 7 am, but was allowed to have about 4 oz of clear juice at 6 am. This made for a very hungry little girl on the almost 2 hour trip to Cincinnati (I hate rush hour traffic.) Of course it didn't help that her brother was drinking chocolate milk and eating glazed donut holes two feet from her.

We finally arrived and after an hour of paperwork (she had to be checked out by a couple of additional doctors because of her heart murmur--she is going to see a pediatric cardiologist next week) she was given the sedative. Benjy watched Lion King while I tried to rock Abby asleep. She was doing really well until she started to feel the effects of the medicine. That loss of control over her body really seemed to scare her and she began to totally freak out. After ten or fifteen minutes of trying to hold on to her, I called the nurses in to help me. We decided that the best thing to do was to wrap her in a blanket from the warmer and simply hold her down until she fell asleep. This was hard for me because she was screaming so loud, but if she didn't fall asleep with the sedative they would have to use general anesthesia.

The audiologist eased my mind a bit and explained that this sort of reaction is very common among kids with hearing loss. Since their hearing is impaired, their other senses are often heightened. This makes them especially sensitive to changes in their other senses and they can experience anxiety when they feel another sense has been impaired. After about twenty minutes of screaming she finally gave in and fell asleep. About 45 minutes later the audiologist brought us a new audiogram that accurately established the degree of her loss.

It turns out that while her first ABR indicated a moderate/moderate-severe loss and subsequent hearing tests had produced a mild/moderate loss result, her actual loss fell in the severe range. Her audiogram shows that without her aids she is not able to hear any of the sounds of speech and in fact she is unable to hear most normal conversations (typically occurs at 50 dB) without her aids. I was disappointed; not because her loss was more severe than we had originally thought, but that we had already wasted a year with poor programming for her aids.