Charlie had a hearing test with Lynn, the BAHA specialist at Children's today. In the waiting room was a boy, probably about 12, who was obviously wired differently. He was sitting at a chalkboard writing numbers and giving his mother, who he called "Mother," a weather report. "Hey Mother! Mother!" he said. "Today will be 81 degrees. Now tomorrow, Mother, tomorrow will be 71. And at night it will be 61. And Mother, on Friday night? It's going down to 51 degrees."
The boy spotted Charlie, left his stool, and got right in Charlie's face, staring at his right ear, then the left, then back to the right. Charlie stood silently. "Hey Mother!" said the boy. "He's got a problem with his ear! But it's OK," he said. "It's OK."
Then they called us in. Charlie performed adorably, plunking the toys in the bucket with every tone he could hear through his headphones.
His hearing in his left ear is still normal. His right ear is still moderate hearing loss. I asked if it was moderate-to-severe or moderate and Lynn said moderate. She put white noise in his left ear and tested his right ear with a bone conduction hearing aid and he could hear normally. His right cochlea, in other words, is fine. Which we already knew.
Lynn laughed out loud when she saw the kooky bone-conduction hearing aid on the homemade sweatband. "How do you like the hearing aid?" she asked Charlie. Charlie slumped over at the waist. Lynn laughed again. "The last thing a kid with craniofacial differences wants is one more thing that makes him look different," she said. Charlie said "I don't want anyone to look at me."
Lynn told me she could not lend me a real BAHA because she had had one, leant it out, and it never came back. "It's gone," she said. Weird. She got out a bunch of plastic models to show me how it works and then put a softband BAHA on Charlie. The band was smaller and the processor and microphone are all in one small piece. She said she always fits kids with bilateral microtia and atresia for BAHAs but doesn't often do it for kids with unilateral hearing loss. But she kept saying "It's a good option," over and over.
"How is his speech?" she asked me. I said I thought it was fine, and the town's speech pathologist thought it was pretty good, but the hearing loss consultant is concerned about him. "I've understood everything he's said in here," she said. We agreed that any speech problems he might have are not due to hearing loss but to oral motor problems.
We agreed that since Charlie is over four, and can get a surgically implanted BAHA at age five, there is not a big point to getting a $4,000 softband BAHA that he will take six months to get used to. "I mean, he could wear it, even during the six months that the surgical implant is integrating into the bone," I said. "That's a lot to ask of him," she said. She does not think it would be a mistake to just leave him alone for now. After all, he is not deaf in his right ear. Those parts of the brain are in fact getting stimulated--it's just that only the louder noises are getting through.
Lynn asked Charlie to repeat certain words, a test for kindergarteners. She spoke into Charlie's right ear, with the white noise in his left, and he got almost all of them: hot dog, popcorn, etc. He just kept saying "taste" instead of "paste." (But wouldn't that be because he mis-heard it?) She said he did very well.
We left the clunky old hearing aid with Lynn. I told her all about the surgeries we're considering, and admitted I wasn't sure what to do. Was I supposed to call the surgeon to schedule it? Why hadn't anyone called me? She gave me the business card for the gal who schedules the surgery. She also mentioned a speech pathologist at the Lexington office who works with kids with craniofacial birth defects; that person might have a good gauge of whether or not Charlie's speech is typical.
Then Charlie ate an enormous chocolate croissant covered with powdered sugar and fell asleep in the car.
Later on I asked Charlie what he meant when he said he didn't want anyone to look at him, and he said "That was just a joke."
