...well, 3 weeks after his surgery we went to the ENT for a post opp check up. Before seeing the ENT, we saw the audiologist. She did the same testing as she did prior to his surgery (which he completely "failed" - showing almost complete hearing loss). I thought he did much better this time around, but she said she wanted to do more testing in 2 weeks when she could get another audiologist in the room to do a 2 person test. Okay, fine with me.
Well, fast forward those 2 weeks, and we are at Feb 11th (this past Monday). Paul took the afternoon off work so he could come with me, be there for Zach, and help take care of Braden while I was in the room with Z for testing. The audiologists did a couple different tests.
1) Testing both ears together - a sound is played from a speaker in the room and they measure Zach's response time/reaction.
2) Testing each ear individually - they put little head phones in his ears and played a sound on each side and measured his reactions.
3) Some computer test - they put a probe in his ear and the computer charted something...sound waves against the ear drum maybe?
After about 40 minutes, he was clearly done paying attention to anything the audiologists wanted him to do, but they said they got enough data for the day. We left the testing room and went out to speak with the ladies.
I guess it's a really bad thing when they ask you to come back for a second evaluation after surgery. I didn't realize how bad his first test (3 weeks after surgery) went. He was showing signs of moderate to severe hearing loss still - whoops. Good news though, is that during his testing on Monday, he was on the boarder of normal to light hearing loss.
This means one of 2 things:
1. He can hear normally in at least 1 (or possibly both) ears,
2. He is a 2 year old boy, and not taking the tests correctly. It's hard to get them to respond to sounds that sound like they may be coming from inside their head sometimes.
While the audiologist was "very pleased" with his results from Monday, she is still not ready to release him and say, "yup, his ears are good". He will go back in for another round of testing in 3-4 months to see where he is at, and then we will just go from there. For now, we are just to watch his ears for abnormal drainage, and making sure his tubes stay nice and clear (unblocked from fluid).
If it's not one thing, it's another!
