Back at Children’s Hospital today. Mitchell had an OT visit at 8 am, a first-time audiology appointment at 9:30 am followed by a visit to radiology to get those hip and back x-rays done. Minimal wait time before each, hooray! We loved the audiologists. They were people of action. They did tests on the spot, at one point taking advantage of Mitchell having fallen asleep which was needed for one of them (an ABR). They generalized that the structure of his middle and inner ear is fine. From testing the left ear while Mitchell slept, they could tell sound traveled to the auditory nerve. They said that was great because they are sometimes not able to even perform the test on some children with neurological issues. What they are not sure of is how the brain processes the sound as it travels up from the auditory nerve. (If this sounds familiar, this is a lot like his vision issues – eye structured perfectly, but not sure what degree of sight the brain actually processes.) Although the test was not done on the right ear, we decided to hold off scheduling further testing until our next neurology appointment (in Feb.) as sedation would be ideal. A full ABR could be coordinated with any other tests requiring sedation.

I have been saying that hearing seems to be improving, my phrase is “more integrated”. Responses to sound are more consistent. We were given pointers of what to do during play/therapy time to help speech/hearing development. Overall, we were quite pleased with this visit.