Update on Broken Aids

I cannot express the great sense of appreciation that I feel for our new audiologist at Children's. She is a wonderful asset and she is already an incredible advocate for our little girl. We received a call from her Wednesday night that she had news-both good and bad. She had consulted with a few other audiologists and everyone agreed that Abby's hearing aids were simply not powerful enough to allow her to hear all the different frequencies of speech. This conclusion was based on the results of Abby's second ABR, which indicated that her residual hearing levels were 10 decibels less than her original diagnosis. Her current aids were being maxed out and still could not reach the highest frequency speech sounds--what this means is that even at their max power her aids would not allow her to distinguish between "sail" and "pail." Since our insurance only pays for hearing aids once every 3 years and the aids that she was recommending were $800 more expensive than her original ones, she was prepared to tell us that we will have to pay out of pocket for the upgrade.

However, she felt that these new aids were really what Abby has needed from day one and that it was not our fault that she was not given the equipment that she truly needed. Our insurance would have paid for these more expensive aids in the beginning, but since we had already filed a claim for her original aids we were pretty much out of luck. Our audiologist was not ready to accept this and agreed that we should not be held responsible for the audiological care that had failed Abigail. She called the rep from Oticon (the company that manufactured Abby's hearing aids) and was able to work a deal between Dayton Children's and Oticon to refund the original order and replace them with brand new, more powerful aids.

We feel so blessed to have such a wonderful professional on our team!