So awesome news… Garbanzo failed his hearing test with flying colors.
It was a total shock to us, since he can hear us and respond accordingly (not with words, but with responses in some form). But apparently, his eardrums aren’t moving at all, and in studying the results of his test, the audiologist looks as though his hearing is basically “Charlie Brown teacher style.” This explains a lot of his speech delay.
The ENT said that the correlation with muffled hearing and language all has to do with his specific age and developmental stage, where his language acquisition skills are at their peak. If Chickpea was hearing this way at her age, it wouldn’t be as big a deal, since she’s already mastered language skills (and then some, in her case). But the combination of him being at the age where one learns to talk, plus really muffled hearing, means that he’s not mimicking because… well, he can’t hear anything to mimic.
The other piece of good news to this is that it looks like the main plausible cause of the hearing loss is nothing more than a serious backup of fluid in his ears. The ENT guesses by the look of things, this fluid has been there at least six months, probably closer to a year. It’s so built up that it’s making his eardrums not move at all.
So Garbanzo is getting tubes, which will immediately show results since that will drain his ears. His speech should improve within two weeks of this surgery, should this be the cause of his speech delay. He will get his hearing rechecked then, and the speech therapist will do a whole new evaluation on him. We’ll know how to proceed from then on.
So we’re really excited! It’s great to get a specific answer to Garbanzo’s rather serious speech delay, and to have a game plan that will hopefully give us some quick results. He’ll probably still need speech therapy, since he’s pretty far behind, but once he can hear again, things will hopefully move forward instead of stagnant, as they have been.
Of course, we feel horribly that his hearing has been this bad for this long. He’s such a laid-back, easy-going guy, he just doesn’t complain about anything. We had no reason to think anything was up because, well, he was acting pretty much the same as he always does. His hearing loss just coincidentally aligned right with when he should have started speaking.
Praise God!
p.s. – I went ahead and added back comments. Not sure if I’ll leave it, but it’s there for now, should you be so inspired.
