Our First Trip to Cincinnati

Yesterday was our first appointment with our new Audiologist at the Mason campus of Cincinnati Children's Hospital. We decided to leave Dayton Children's after a series of mistakes were made:

1. Abigail's hearing aids have a rocker switch that controls the volume. For kids under the age of four, this switch is supposed to be disabled via the computer software that initially programs the aids. After eight months and two trips to see two different audiologists regarding the programming of her aids, we discovered that her volume controls were never disabled. Each time we cleaned her aids we were unknowingly raising and lowering the volume--a lot of very precious hearing time wasted.
2. Three different requests to have ear molds redone because of audiologist error.
3. The inability for our original ENT to explain our Connexin 26 diagnosis to us.
4. The polite refusal to repeat a hearing test because I thought her last test was not accurate.

We are very excited to get Abby's care back on track and this was just the fresh start that we needed. We started out the appointment with a brief history, records review and dove right into an unaided hearing test. It was again the same sound booth format as before (with two audiologists), but after about 20 minutes of testing the audiologist asked to stop so that we could talk. I had sensed that she seemed disappointed in what Abby was responding to, but I wasn't sure until she asked about Abby's ABR (Auditory Brainstem Response Test). Once she asked about that, I knew she had suspected that Abby's hearing loss hadn't been accurately mapped. She felt the best course of action was for Abigail to have a second ABR, this time sedated, so that we would be able to pinpoint her hearing ability exactly. These new results would allow for exact programming of her hearing aids across all frequencies.

We are quite nervous about sedating her, but know that this is a necessary step to her speech development. We feel confident that moving to Cincinnati Children's was a step in the right direction. We feel like we learned more from this two hour appointment than we have learned from an entire year of care at Dayton Children's. Our course of action is as follows:

1. Repeat Abby's ABR to determine exactly what her loss is;
2. reprogram her hearing aids based on her new results; and
   
3. meet with an Aural Rehabilitation Therapist to have an evaluation.

Our ABR is set for September 8th.