Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Audio Update

Today Logan was scheduled to do sound booth testing at Sunshine Cottage.  During these sessions, Logan, his advisor Lindsay, and I sit in a sound proof booth while Marci, his audiologist, will play tones at different decibels and frequencies to measure what he can and cannot hear.  We usually do this every 3 months or so but it had been a while since Logan managed to get sick every time we were on the schedule.

I am so proud of how well he did today.  Not only did he cooperate long enough for Marci to get all the information she needed, but he is doing phenomenally well with his implants and learning to listen.  We were able to keep him entertained long enough to listen and respond to those boring tones for about half an hour.  Anyone with experience with a 21 month old toddler knows that this is no small feat!  We actually thought we lost his attention about 10 minutes in but were able to get him back into it.

The last time we did a booth session, he was responding behaviorally between 20 and 25 decibels (around the sound of a whisper).  This time, he responded between 10 and 20 decibels, with 10 being the sound of breathing. The great thing about these results is that his hearing is measured by his behavioral responses so it is not necessarily his threshold for hearing.  But what is even more amazing and what had me totally floored is that Marci actually got a response twice (once at the beginning and once at the end of the session) at 0 db, which is almost complete silence. Lindsay and I didn't even hear that one!

Below is his latest audiogram, which is simply a graph that shows a person's hearing thresholds for various frequencies.  When Logan had his hearing aids, his thresholds were always inside or below the greyed out area, meaning he did not have access to a lot of the sounds in the English language. But now, as you can see, he has access to most / all the sounds in the English language and basically has better than "normal hearing."


1 comment:

  1. My son is 7.5 months old. He just had his second booth test and finally got his hearing aids set to wear again (we had an order not to wear from 4 months until now). His booth test showed a 76db loss in one ear and an 80db loss in the other. We are right in the limbo area for implants or hearing aids. I see your son received some benefit from HAs and did need a CI. What was your sons hearing range before the CI? I would love for you to email me LindseyHWood@yahoo.com

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