audiology

Tate had his follow up appointment with the audiologist Wednesday since he didn’t pass his hearing test in his right ear in the NICU. Unfortunately, Tate failed this second test as well. His left ear has passed the test both times so it’s only the right side that is causing concern.


For the first 6 weeks of his life, until he was able to lift his head, Tate only laid on his right ear. The ear itself was always curled up under his head. As he started moving his head from side to side that got better, but the ear is still a little “deformed” from laying on it so much. It looks different than his left side but I think it’s because the right side curls up and doesn’t lay flat. His pediatrician said it could still form more cartilage and start lying flatter but it might not. (I actually tried taping it down the other day, but the tape didn’t stick very long.) So I’ve always been a little concerned about that ear, especially after he didn’t pass the hearing test in it. He still prefers to always have the right side of his head down when he sleeps and has a limited range of motion to that side as well, which is something we are going to start in looking at things to look a certain direction, he just prefers to have his head turned that way. So unless I physically turn it to the left, he always lays on the right.

The test that he failed, otoacoustic emission (OAE), he has to be very quiet and still for. Tate was asleep but he was still grunting and breathing loud, so she was never able to complete the test. (She did his left side first and he was still sound asleep, but by the time she got to the right ear he was stirring around.) She was also having a hard time keeping the probe in his ear and she kept commenting that he has a very small, narrow ear canal. Since she was having so much trouble running the OAE she decided to run a different test instead. This test is called a tympanogram and it measures how much the ear drum is moving. As she started the test she said “what we want to see here is a peak…and his is totally flat.” Not what we wanted to hear.

It could still just be that he has fluid in his ear, or congestion, that is not allowing his ear drum to move, which in turn, is causing him to fail the OAE test. At this point we are waiting 6 more weeks and then will take him back to do the tests again. Hopefully in 6 weeks his ears will have grown and if there is fluid or congestion, that will drain or clear up and he will pass the test with no problems. If he doesn’t pass the test, the next step will be to do an auditory brainstem response test (ABR). In this test they hook up electrodes on his head and headphones on his ears. Then they test his brains’ response to the sounds to see if (or what) he’s hearing.

I started googling all this stuff as soon as I got home and reading about the tests made me remember that Tate had passed a different hearing test in both ears and then had failed the OAE in his right ear while in the NICU. I went digging through his discharge papers but the only thing I could find was something called a Mini BAER test. I googled this and every article I found was about dog hearing tests. Still haven’t figured that out. So I just called the audiologist back and asked her. She looked it up and said they had also done an ABR screening on Tate and he had passed in both ears. She then said “what that says to me is that it probably is just fluid since he passed the ABR.”. Made me feel better. She said if it is just fluid, the typical treatment for that is to put a tube in his ear, which they don’t do till he’s around 1 year old, and by then it’s possible the fluid won’t be an issue anymore. But she did say the ABR screening they did in the NICU was just a screening, not the full blown test. The actual test would have more tones and pitches so it’s possible there are some tones and pitches he isn’t hearing, which would cause him to fail the OAE test, but still pass the ABR screening. So it’s all really just wait (pray) and see what happens in 6 weeks.