I can't believe it!

Today was a stressful day. I decided to run a few loads of laundry while the kids were playing nicely together in the toy room. After a few minutes Abby started screaming. I rushed in to see what was wrong and there was Benjy trying to hold her back by the elastic strap of her hearing aid clip. I have seen him do this a few times before and each time he has been reprimanded swiftly for it. I was just about to yell, "Let Go!," when I saw it happen. The elastic clip snapped, her hearing aid flew up in the air while the ear hook (the plastic part of the hearing aid that the earmold is connected to)was still attached to her ear mold. He had pulled so hard that the whole thing cracked right in half! I screamed--partly because I wasn't sure if he would live to see dinnertime and partly because I had no idea what else to do. I couldn't believe it--a three year old managed to break a fifteen-hundred dollar piece of equipment in the blink of an eye and even worse, right in front of me.

I spent the next thirty minutes on the phone with our new audiologist figuring out the next step. Lucky for us Oticon (the company that manufactured Abby's aids) warrants the hearing aids for one year--no matter what. The means that if Abby throws them out the window on the interstate--they'll replace them, or if in our case her brother decides she's a horse and can be controlled with her built-in "reins" and the aid splits right in half--they'll replace them. Thank God we're still in the warranty period. We will have to make an unexpected trip back down to Cincinnati tomorrow to fill out our warranty paperwork, send the broken aids in (we are going to send both in to be checked and/or replaced) and fit a set of loaner aids for Abby. Most pediatric audiology departments run a loaner program for this exact purpose. Her loaner aids will be programmed to her loss and will help her to stay on track while we wait the two-three weeks for her aids to be repaired.

As I type this I am sad, looking down at this pearl pink hearing aid cracked in half. Her aids are as much a part of her as her big blue eyes and I wonder how lonely she must feel when she can't hear our voices.