We Can Rebuild Her

Part of my recent blogging poopy-headedness has been dealing with a minor medical drama with my youngest kid. Over the past 3 or 4 months, we'd noticed that her speech was lagging behind her peers. At her age, lots of kids start to self-correct any unusual speech patterns (lisps, etc), but she just wasn't doing it. She'd always been a bit delayed verbally compared to her older sister, but that just meant she was in the middle of the bell curve rather than a freak of nature, so we'd never been too concerned. However, in the midst of starting to look into speech therapy, I had an incident where it became completely clear that she just couldn't hear me. Previously, we'd interpreted similar episodes as her just being very absorbed in what she was doing -- if you've ever dealt with a three-year old, you know that they're excellent at ignoring you when they choose. This incident was different, though, and pointed strongly at her being hearing impaired. A follow-up at the doctor's confirmed our suspicion, when she could only hear the very loudest tone at any frequency. A bit after Christmas we got in to see the audiologists, who found that she had about 40 decibels of hearing loss. For comparison, dense foam earplugs are rated at a bit less than 30 decibels. The uncertainty before we got into the audiologists was kindof awful (though we of course were very chin up about it). We didn't know if her hearing loss was degenerative, if it was correctable, and if, to what level. Mostly, however, I just felt terrible for her, because she'd been struggling for years just to understand anything that was going on around her. At the same time, I was tremendously proud of how well she coped, because damn, she was good at figuring out what you meant from not a whole lot of aural cues. Most people were shocked to find out that she was hearing impaired, because she can hold a conversation with you. However, once you know, you notice that during every few conversational back-and-forths, her ability to extrapolate your meaning would break down, and she'd get screwed up. So, all this time she's been devoting a huge fraction of her tiny little CPU to a highly-advanced voice-recognition system. In spite of the fact that she's been good at passing, there are a number of traits that made a lot of sense once we knew about the hearing loss. For example, she has always been very self-contained and independent, but I suspect that's largely because she only can process what she's directly paying attention to. She never overhears conversations or background sounds, and so is frequently oblivious of what's going on (again, it's easy to miss this being a medical symptom, rather than a bad case of being three). She has great difficulty finding you in the house, since she doesn't hear footsteps, doors closing, or water running. The good news is that I now have no need to take advantage of my new knowledge of where to learn ASL in the Seattle area. The audiologists found that the problem was that her middle ear was filled up with the ear's equivalent of snot, which is easily correctable with tubes. She had the surgery today, and it is like she's a different kid. The change was dramatic, and essentially immediate. Suddenly, she's chatty. She no longer pauses before answering you -- I'd never noticed that she'd had this processing latency until it went away. She heard my husband from across the room. She swiveled instantly at hearing the ding of the elevator down the hallway. She is about a factor of ten times more engaged with everything around her, and it is so completely gratifying to witness.