After over a month of waiting, Ellie's specialist audiology appointment finally arrived. I was just focused on finding out how bad the loss was. But I was also anxious about how we would go keeping her asleep, as the reflux was playing up again.
She was sleeping soundly in her capsule when we arrived. The last audiologist had been happy to leave her in the capsule for testing, but this one, Kate, insisted I take her out. "It will wake her up but she'll go back to sleep easily," she said. Yeah right. Clearly she's not the mother of a reflux baby.
It took 40 minutes to resettle Ellie enough to do the first tests. I then had to feed her and resettle her again, another 40 minutes. But we got through all of the tests in the end.
She passed the nerve tests with ease, but failed the others, which meant that the nerves that control response to sound were working properly, so any loss had to be caused by a blockage in the ears.
This was great news. A blockage is easily fixable with grommets inserted during her palate repair, and her hearing would then return to normal. There should be no long term loss, although its possible that her whisper hearing might be permanently affected.
It was good to finally know that Ellie could hear our voices too. I'd felt a bit silly at times talking away to her and not knowing if she could even hear me.
We would need to see Kate again in four months to see if the problem had worsened, but other than that there was nothing we needed to do, and really nothing to worry about. She could hear most things for now, and although it would probably get worse before it got better, it would get better. And that's all that matters.
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