Today we had what are hopefully Peter's last hearing aid molds made, and another sound booth test. I talked with the audiologist, T., about how I thought Peter has been responding to my making high-pitched raspberries, and Peter looked up at me when I demonstrated the noise. I told T. how I thought I was getting more reaction to sound, at least the raspberry sound, in the last few days. It hasn't been 100% consistent, and my husband said I was imagining things, but I kept making a big deal out of it anytime it seemed like Peter was reacting to noise I made.
The sound booth test was pretty short, but T. was able to get a consistent response at the louder levels (70 dB) and got some, though not completely consistent responses at 50-55 dB! Peter HAD been reacting to my weird noises! And he was reacting to T.'s "buh, buh, buh. Peter! Where am I?" This is good news, in that it means there is some auditory information being processed. Good to know there is some function in the inner ear, the auditory nerve is being stimulated, and that Peter reacts to and tries to find out where a noise is coming from. Based on all the previous tests, and Peter's behavior in general, we are still thinking that there isn't a lot of speech sound that Peter can hear, but we will take what we can get for now! T. was so happy for Peter, and praised him on the good job. I was happy, and relieved, too. Looking on the Internet one finds all kinds of information about syndromes that may be linked to hearing loss, and it is easy to get freaked out. My latest parananoia was something called "Duane's Syndrome", where the hearing loss is due to a severely malformed or even absent cochlea. A missing or severely malformed cochlea could make a cochlear implant impossible or less likely to be successful, so thankfully the sound booth results point away from something like that. We'll know more when we get the scans at the end of the month, but I was happy to have these "good" results for now!
After the fun of watching elephants playing drums in the sound booth was the ear mold "torture". Gooey cold stuff squeezed into screaming baby's ears. It shouldn't be painful, but Peter didn't like being held tightly or the sensation of the goo. Hopefully it's the last time we need to do that, since it's no fun, and that was the last time the molds were free under the warranty. Sydney and Samantha came with, and got to make their own super bouncy balls out of some ear mold goo that T. squeezed into their palms. They had more fun than Peter did with the pink goo!
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