Ha-ha this is the girl that we live with everyday!
Pleases keep Norah in your thoughts. She will be going back to Children’s hospital on the 29th of January to get her left ear implanted with a CI. It is well documented that kids with Bilateral Cochlear Implants do much better with speech, hearing in noisy situations and in discriminating which direction sound is coming from.
Right now when Norah hears Lori or I call her name she must look around at us to see who called her. With two CI’s she should start to learn where the sound is coming from.
It is amazing how the brain can tell in a milli-second that the sound hit the left ear first so that is the direction of the sound production.
We hope this will help her when she gets to school too. To hear people on her left side or right side talk to her.
She still has a long way to go before she understands speech.
We will be in speech therapy for years to help Norah learn to listen and speak. Luckily she loves going to speech therapy. I see her making progress with her listening and speech every week so we are hopeful that she will be able to communicate with her hands much more in the coming years and be starting to use her voice more.
After her ear has time to heal they will activate her left ear and we will work on wearing that ears CI processor for a month by its self to program that ear to a good mapping. Then she will start wearing both, if everything goes well within one year of coming home from China she will have gone from being profoundly deaf in both ears all the time to being able hear a whisper in both ears when her CI’s are on. We are excited and nervous about her upcoming surgery. She has a really good surgeon but there is always risks with any surgery so again pleases be thinking about her on the 29th.
That's one sharp dressed sheep!
That's one sharp dressed sheep!
6 comments:
Do you follow this woman's blog? Her daughter has double CI.
http://jazzieandtahlia.typepad.com/
oh yeah she is really nice lady and helpful too!
Smiling at the comments above :-)
Before Jazzie got her second implant, she had trouble with exactly what you described. Now that she has had her implant for 16months, we see a MAJOR improvement in localizing sound and her ability to hear in noisy environments. She absolutely hated her second implant at first and it was a good 8-12 months before she started getting good use of it.
You know Jazzie was in speech therapy/aural rehab for 5 years before mainstreaming. Now she is doing great and people cannot tell she is deaf. I am sure with hard work and your dedication to Norah, she will thrive.
I will be thinking about you on the 29th.
Good luck on the 29th.
your daughter looks very active & smart. I wish her a world of luck on Jan 29th!
Good morning...I just popped over from No Hands But Ours...
Good luck on the surgery next week.
My daughter has a cochlear implant & while we did not have access to the excellent aural rehab facilities that Jazzie had, my daughter is doing very well with her CI too. She's also mainstreamed. Is fluent in ASL, still goes to speech, but many people who meet her do not realize that she is deaf.
I think the CI technology is AMAZING!!
what a ham !
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