HEARING AIDS

I was elated! Finally, he would get hearing aids!! I was even more happy when she told me that she wanted to have him get a bone conduction hearing aid. (For those of you who are not familiar with Audiology, when an audiologist does hearing testing they will perform an air test through the ear using inserts similar to ear buds first. If the scores are not normal they will perform a test that uses the bones behind the ear as the mode of ‘conduction’ to the cochlea. If there is a difference in the score then they look if you have an ear infection, problems with the ear drum, etc. If all is clear the patient has hearing loss.) So any how, I was so glad that she was going to give him a bone conduction aid, because I had seen the tremendous change of the energy in his responses to the sounds when bone conduction was used. I knew it was the best choice.

At the cost of $1000, He got his headband at the beginning of March 2010 (Bone Conduction Hearing Aid). The Audiologist completed testing with it on and to my dismay it only improved his scores by 5-15dB;  bone conduction equipment used for the testing mentioned above showed improvements between 20-40 dB. I talked to her about air conduction aids and she felt that they were too powerful for him. So we took the bone conduction aid. After using it for two weeks, we had noticed another child at church wearing hearing aids. I immediately went and spoke to the parents.

I found that he had the same hearing loss as Alex; like Alex he also had failed newborn hearing screening. (Here comes the question! How is it that air conduction aids are too strong for Alex and not for this other child?) And the mother, very similar to me, felt her toddler heard fine. . . that is until he put on the hearing aids. So in talking to this mother, She let me know that the Audiologist they were working with was a Pediatric Audiologist from Florida (the one we were using was an Industrial Audiologist). I needed to hear nothing more than ‘Audiologist’ and ‘Florida’ to know that this was the person we needed to take Alex to. (In my searching I found out that Florida along with Colorado are the leaders in infant hearing)