Jordan gets fitted for a hearing aid

Ahhhh. At last the worst of the heat wave seems to have abated and temperatures are a little more conducive to blogging. As I mentioned in the previous post, a lot has happened in the last week, since Jordan’s first ABR when we learned of his hearing impairment. There was a cancellation at the Burnaby hearing clinic which allowed us to be seen again much sooner than we were originally booked, so we packed up Jordy and went to complete the test that was started on the first visit. The audiologist recorded results consistent with the first visit and got that extra bit of information she was looking for to conclude the test. Jordan’s hearing loss is slightly better in his left ear, but the difference between the two is negligible and may be called the same. The loss is sensorineural which means there is a deficit in the inner ear and this indicates permanent hearing loss; whether it is degenerative and what causes it will be determined by a hearing specialist who we will see at a later date.

Now having gathered all the information she needed, the audiologist arranged for us to get fitted for Jordy’s hearing aids at the New Westminster Clinic, as it is a bit closer to us. I was able to get us in just this last Thursday. Chris wasn’t absolutely necessary at this appointment so he stayed at work to catch up on what he had missed the last two appointments. I invited our best friend, Aida to come along as she had the day free. The Audiologist there is Selma and there are two technicians: Kelly and Vivian, may as well get familiar as we’ll be going there pretty regularly! It turns out that I recognized Kelly as the person who administered Jordan’s very first test at the hospital. She mixed up some blue goop and used a syringe to squeeze it into Jordy’s ears to create a mold of his outer ear and ear canal which will be used to create an ear mold. It looked as though someone had stuck some old blue chewing gum to the kiddo's ear! We chose the colour blue for them this time, but any time he gets a new ear mold he can choose a different colour; I think that’s kind of cool! As he will be growing a lot in the next little while we will likely be going in for new molds frequently, Kelly said sometimes as often as bi-weekly. We went with Selma’s suggestion for the model of hearing aid (she would know better than I!) and chose a relatively neutral two-tone colour scheme that will blend in with his skin tone somewhat, although you can choose from a variety of colours for the casing, something he may like to do when he is older. She says they should be in by next Wednesday at the latest and so we’re booked in to pick them up next Thursday afternoon! I am super excited about this! I can hardly wait to see what his reaction will be to this new, bigger world of sound!

What I was (and I am sure you are too) curious to know was, what can he hear and what does his hearing sound like? Selma says that in general, his hearing is a bit muffled in comparison to yours and mine. But in ideal conditions (very little background noise, and when the sound is coming straight at him, rather than obliquely or from behind) he can hear almost all of the normal range of hearing and most of the normal range of speech. What he has the hardest time with are subtle sounds like: h, s, t, sh, ch, k, p, f, and th sounds in the higher frequencies. I’ve recreated as best I can, Jordan’s audiogram for you below. First of all my disclaimer: I poached the overall audiogram graphic of the “speech banana” from the web and between importing it into a graphics program to add Jordy’s information and then converting it again for the blog, the quality (which wasn’t so hot to begin with) has kind of broken down a bit, but I think it is still an adequate illustration for our purposes.


A person with normal, healthy hearing abilities can hear just about everything on the graph, from 0 on the decibel (dB) axis and down. Someone with slight hearing loss may not be able to hear anything less than 15 to 25 dB. Someone with a mild hearing deficit would have trouble with sounds below 25 to 40 dB. Moderate hearing loss indicates difficulty with sounds below 40 to 70 dB. And severe to profound deafness is indicated by trouble hearing the very loudest sounds, some people in this range can still hear sounds above 70 dB and some can hear almost nothing at all. Jordan is in the moderate range. He is hard of hearing sounds below about 45 dB. The speech banana (the banana or boomerang shape in the middle of the graph) shows the range of hearing for normal speech. And the coloured lines that are plotted on the graph indicate Jordy’s hearing; the blue line with Xs, illustrate his left ear and the red line with Os – his right. In basic terms, any sounds that fall in the range of sound above those lines on the graph (whispers, and leaves rustling, as well as the speech sounds I mentioned earlier) are hard for him to hear. Good news is, with hearing aids, he will likely be able to hear all of those things! Some of you may have noticed, Jordan’s audiogram is “incomplete” it only records data between 500 and 4000 Hz. It is important to note that this is the range that they test on infants. As he gets a bit older, a wider range will gradually be tested.

I can’t go on enough about how extremely lucky Chris and I are that we have been able to discover Jordan’s hearing loss when we did and once again, I thank my lucky stars that I live where I do. The Early Hearing Program (EHP) is brand new in British Columbia; it has only been around for a couple of years. And the only other province with a comparable program is Ontario. In fact, according to Selma, such programs exist to catch hearing impairment in babies only in these two provinces in Canada, a few States in the US and in the United Kingdom. And only in Canada and the UK are there services to provide for the cost of hearing aids and supplemental resources. Ear molds and the hearing aid, will be paid for by the province until Jordan reaches the age of five. I am sure you can guess how ecstatic we are about that! The EHP also is working to put us in contact with another family in a similar situation and allows us to get Jordan into one of three “interventionist” programs which are resource centres that provide family support, pre-school programs and the like for kids with hearing loss. We haven’t decided which we’ll use, but we’re working to research the decision. These interventionist programs can help us to decide whether we want to use sign language in our communication with the kiddo and if so, they’ll educate us. I’ll be posting links to our hard of hearing / deafness resources to the left of the blog page, so you can check them out if you like and will leave them there permanently for your reference.

Wow! It’s great to have all that off my chest and for our nearest and dearest to read up on. Chris and I both really do feel a lot more optimistic about things, and we’re extremely thankful that the Early Hearing Program exists. Good wishes, happy thoughts and excellent advice continue to flow in from family and friends, thanks so much everyone!

In other news, Jordan does continue to grow and delight us. The little Dumer managed to roll over from his tummy to his back for the first time ever while we were on vacation at Paradise Lake, but his ol’ Mom wasn’t ready with the camera, but he’s done this little trick several times since, and this time we’ve got footage: