By the professional's suggestion we went ahead with tubes in case "something" was just fluid in the ears. We'd been down that road before with daughter 2. Her fluid caused monthly ear infections which lead to her complete hearing loss so we decided to be pro-active this time and do tubes early.
Caleb had tubes put in when he was 6 months old. Let me tell you- not fun.
As he grew so did my speculations. As we approached the age of 1 (the same age as when I realized our first daughter was deaf), I noticed the tell-tell signs.
They are subtle. Hard to notice if you aren't looking for them.
1. No response. Even though Caleb does respond to sounds, he doesn't respond to all or even a majority of sounds. So vacuums, loud voices, even regular pitched voices he notices, but not quiet sounds or high pitch sounds.
2. No understandable spoken language. When other babies are starting to say words, Caleb is still babbling. And even though kids develop at all different ages, this was a different kind of babbling. For example- some kids just are not talkers. They make very little sounds at all. Only Caleb was making lots of sounds. But it was more like he was trying to speak another language all together- say Chinese not English. And even the words that we could understand (Mama) sounded like certain letters were missing or changed.
3. The scare factor. This one is interesting. Caleb would be fine with loud noises as long as they were not near him. However if I was holding him or sitting next to him and called for someone he would start looking around frantically or cry, or both. He'd almost dive into my lap to get away from whatever that big scary sound was. My thoughts is that sound to him were not constantly surrounding him and when they were amplified (from being close up and loud) they were too surprising for him to handle. This was the biggest indicator to me that he had hearing loss since all 3 of my girls did this.
4. The silent mouth. Daughter 2 has always been really big on this one and Caleb started doing this so it made me wonder. He will move his mouth like he's talking but there's no sound- like an old silent film.
5. Very visual. Everything has to be seen to be understood. If I sign a word, he picks it up in a flash and heads for the door or to the fridge for whatever I signed but when I just use my voice- nothing.
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| Caleb taking in the world around him |
I'm sure there are more signs that I just haven't put into words. There were just too many to ignore and something tugging in my mind/gut saying he's hard of hearing. Not deaf but definitely hard of hearing.
When in doubt- go with the gut feeling. It's almost always right.
Tomorrow I'll tell about our audiology appointment. Join us for the next post to hear "the rest of the story"!
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