It is useless knowledge really, but I wondered. Then I Googled the origin of the yard and found that according to the all-knowing internet, “A yard was originally the length of a man’s belt or girdle, as it was called. In the 12th century, King Henry I of England fixed the yard as the distance from his nose to the thumb of his outstretched arm. Today it is 36 inches.” Fascinating.
I was pondering this because my early intervention specialist gave me a lesson for my four-month-old son, Wyatt, which explained the importance of proximity of my mouth to Wyatt’s ear/hearing aid microphone. She reminded me that you should always be at about an arms length, or a yardstick, from his mic if you want him to hear you well. For a child with hearing loss, that is a critical length to remember because the microphone functions best at this distance from sound. When they are babies that is easy because much of the day they are actually much closer to us than a yardstick’s distance as we cuddle them, feed them, burp them, rock them, etc. As I am now a great narrator of my day to my baby, that means my voice is always close by when I’ve got him close to me and he can get more of the language his brain needs. I also think of it in terms of my daughter Ella’s cochlear implant microphone—if she says “Huh” get closer to her and repeat, maybe have her look at me. We could also use her FM system to bring the sound of my voice to a fabulous distance of 6 inches from her ear.
So after gaining a full understanding of the yardstick and how to guestimate it regularly, I started wondering what else I spend my days measuring with different “yardsticks” : How good of a parent was I today? How caring and open was I to others? Did I accomplish all I hoped to at my job today? Are my children well-dressed? How appropriate are their clothes and accessories when considering the weather and all of the Joneses at our fairly affluent suburban school? How long did I work out today? How many steps does my pedometer have on it today? Ok, in truth, I do not really work out and I do not own a pedometer. But it was a nice thought. How genuine am I being in this blog post? How well-written is it? You get the idea. Always measuring.
My husband and I will often measure our success with each other based on how much we are multitasking in pursuit of a well-oiled machine of a home. “I sent three emails while nursing a baby and making a phone call to the security company. What did you do today?”
I truly believe, due to my feminist upbringing, that (sorry, guys) women always win at the multitasking game. Which is why, I think that the following meme was going around Facebook recently and I have seen it in my newsfeed at least twice this week.
It is just not fair to measure our spouses by how many tabs they can maintain at once, right?
In my stressed- out-working-mom-of-three life please now add a tab for hearing loss and another one for yardsticks. I am even more evolved now because I have 2,859 tabs open. Seriously, though, I can now physically measure how well Wyatt and Ella are hearing me through their hearing technology. Am I more than an arms length away? If so, that is too far. Get closer and keep talking. That is what I am thinking each time I look at my baby sitting in a chair or lying on a blanket or being held by someone else. Get closer and keep talking in pursuit of 30 million words.
Interestingly, we also got some news about Wyatt’s hearing loss last week that is making me think even more about measurement. His MRI shows that he has enlarged vestibular aqueduct syndrome, which means that the bony canals that connect the inner ear to the depths of the skull are larger than a millimeter. A millimeter is roughly the size of the head of a pin! So tiny. When I read this online, I was shocked that something that itty bitty could by itself be such a raging menace to one of our senses.
And then I realized that such is life—it is the small things, not always the big things that matter most and the impact of a small thing can often be huge.
In our case, something went wrong in the 5th week of my pregnancy, either by genetic code or by environment, (read: because of something I am or something I did), so that the tiny millimeter sized tube in his skull got too big during its formation. Soon it would create a pressure imbalance leading to malfunction of the hearing hair cells, called cilia, in his inner ear. Those are even tinier than a millimeter—they are microscopic and there are thousands of them in his cochlea. At this very moment, in fact, there are quite possibly some minuscule hair cells dying in his inner ear. Poor little dudes.
Strangely, this is both good and bad news for us. On the good side, we now know the culprit for both of our kids. Somehow the understanding that Ella has EVAS never got to my brain as usable information until Friday. I’m not saying the doctor didn’t use the words and I’m not saying I didn’t hear them or process them, but somehow I did not absorb this information after Ella’s MRI enough to make it usable. No matter who is to blame for me not getting it, I never did until Friday.
Here’s a measurement: It took exactly four years, four months and four days for me to “hear” the cause of this profound life that I’m living. It was liberating to finally have some more understanding. It was also a little depressing to know that Wyatt’s good ear, his left, could very well have progressive hearing loss at some unknown point in his life just like the right ear. He should avoid contact sports, head trauma from falls, and at some later date, maybe even air travel (?) because the sudden pressure changes in his head can impact his hearing. However, I was oddly relieved to know that if he goes completely deaf in his right ear, and the left also begins to decline, his chances for quality, long-term amplification actually go up. You see, many people do not know that you are not a cochlear implant candidate until you have hearing loss bilaterally (or in both ears). So, if he remained unilateral, or deaf in only his right ear, and the left ear had typically sized vestibular aqueducts, he would live his life kind of one-sided and would always struggle locating sound, could possibly have a language delay, would always struggle in noisy environments, etc. In fact, if his left ear stays typical and his right ear continues on the slippery slope that it is going in, we would eventually discontinue even hearing aid use. In other words, if the two ears are too different from each other, hearing aids no longer improve hearing, they just distort it.
Soooooo…. as for yardsticks, when it comes to early language learning, one ear is not necessarily better than none.
Tomorrow we go to the audiologist to trade in his hearing aid for a stronger one because of the progression to the severe range that we also discovered last week—the softest sound Wyatt can hear in his right ear is measuring between 60 and 70 decibels across all of the frequencies of sound, which makes his hearing moderately severe instead of moderate to severe. Here he is right before his MRI. Let’s see how he looks tomorrow with his bigger hearing aid.
Bigger. Sigh.
I’m not worried….I will still want to eat his cute little cheeks. Isn’t that how we measure baby cuteness? By how edible they are?
No comments:
Post a Comment