ABR

Tate passed his ABR (auditory brainstem response) test on Tuesday.  Another answered prayer! This means that his hearing loss is temporary and caused by fluid in his ear rather than a problem with his cochlea.  Since he has failed the OAE (hearing screening) three times now in his right ear, the audiologist did this test to determine if there was an actual problem with sound conduction.  The audiologist was pretty sure it was fluid causing the problem (because he had failed the tempanogram twice as well) but I was still pretty nervous about this test.  First of all just nervous about the results but also nervous about conducting the test itself  When I scheduled the test she told me it would take about an hour and a half and she'd get the best results if he slept through the whole thing.  So she recommended keeping him awake all morning so he'd sleep in the afternoon for the test. Ummm...how do you keep a 9 week old awake all morning?!?  Fortunately Tate cooperated because he only took 2 short - about 30 minute - naps that morning.  But he also didn't eat well before we left so I wasn't sure what would happen.

When we got there she let me nurse him for a little bit to get him nice and drowsy (My first time to get to use my hooter hider! Thank you Nana!).  That worked but once I laid him down and she started the test it woke him back up.  She was sending sounds into his ear and you could tell he could hear them because he kept turning his head to that side and looking around.  (Pretty cute and reasurring to me because I could tell he was hearing from his right ear.)  After about 5 minutes of trying to get him to hold still and go to sleep she suggested I hold him.  She was able to put the computer on a strap and I hung it over my shoulder, then I was able to walk around and get him to sleep.  Then I ended up holding him through most of the rest of the test.

After just a few minutes the audiologist was able to tell that it was most likely a fluid problem.  As she was sending the soundwaves into his ear, the results were showing a "shifting".  Meaning that if it should have taken 2 milliseconds for the sound to reach his brain, his were taking 4 milliseconds.  And all the sounds were shifted that way.  So the results were already looking good.

For the second part of the test they actually tested the cochlea.  This involved putting a pair of "headphones" on him that instead of going on his ear rested behind his ear where the cochlea is.  This showed her that the cochlea was functioning completely normal.  In fact, his results were perfect.  So perfect, the other audiologist, who is presenting at a seminar in a few weeks in Chicago, asked if she could use his test results as a sample at the seminar, to show what a perfect ABR is supposed to look like!

So the next step will be to take him to an ENT (ear, nose and throat doctor).  We'll do that in the next month and see what they suggest about the fluid that must be blocking his ear drum.  The audiologist said the most common thing is to do tubes, but they don't normally do those until around 1 year of age. So we're assuming that the ENT will just tell us to wait and see if the fluid goes away on its own.  If it hasn't when he turns one, then we'll have to consider tubes.  But the audiologist did say the hearing loss he has is minor so it shouldn't interfere with his speech development.  She said to him it probably sounds a lot like what we hear if we hold a finger over our ear.  Just muffled but still intelligible.  We are supposed to take him back in to the audiologist at some point for another OAE test.  She said they like to have on record showing he actually passed one, so we'll probably do that in another year too.