Can You Hear Me Now?

I took the kids to their well check on the 16th. It was pretty standard. They are growing beautifully and got a clean bill of health. Their hearts are still beating and all of that good stuff. The doctor told me that I "need to do a better job with the sunscreen" because my "girls are really brown." I looked at her and said, "Well, they are always pretty brown because they are Hispanic." "But you are so fair complected..." Lady, this was not a virgin birth. "I am white and my husband is Puerto Rican." She looked kind of embarrassed that she commented on the "brown" skin of my kids but it's all good. I'm not a hater. We are trying to get some minority scholarships. Anyway, I left the office feeling good that my kids are doing well.

I get into the office on the following Tuesday morning and I had a voice mail from the pediatric office, "Your referral to the ENT for C has been accepted and she has an appointment scheduled for 3:15 pm." WTF? Why would she need to go to the ENT? I called the office and left a message asking why my daughter needed a referral. This bee-otch lady called me back and had an attitude with me, "Well, she needs to go because she failed her hearing test." She said it as if I was a big idiot and I should have known. I almost lost it on this lady. "Well, the physician did not tell me there was an issue when I was in the office with her. It would be nice to know these things." I set down the phone and was kind of devastated.

My poor baby has a hard time hearing and I didn't know? What kind of a mother doesn't recognize that their kid is having hearing problems? Do I yell too much? I should not have let her listen to the mp3 player with headphones. Can she hear the teacher? A million things raced through my mind. I was so anxious all day. I just wanted to get there and find out what was going on.

I picked up the kids early and she looked at me suspiciously. "We are going to the doctor." "Why?" I smiled at her, "Because they found an elephant in your ear." She looked at me annoyed. "They said you failed your hearing test. Do you have a hard time hearing people?" She thought for a minute, "No - but can I have a treat because I have to go to the doctors?" Typical. My 6 year old got really excited, "Me too!"

We got to the office and waited forever. I wanted to adopt out my youngest child because laid underneath the bench in the waiting room and refused to come out. I was so irritated. Finally the audiologist called us back and he asked my daughter a lot of questions about school and how she hears things. Then he put her in this sound proof box to do all these tests. My youngest and I weren't allowed to watch because that could have distracted her. My youngest kept going over to the hearing aids and looking at them and looking back at me. Waiting for the moment I turned my head so she could play with them them. This was me:

Then she climbed from chair to chair like a monkey. It was horrible. 

Anyway, the audiologist is going through a series of tests and pushing buttons and he said, "Your child has razor sharp hearing...." then he paused and started pushing some more buttons. "Hmmmm....that's odd." He was playing with his little machine. I was kind of freaked out. What is odd? He took off his head phones and took her out of the box. He sat us down. "Your daughter has hearing loss in her right ear. He hearing is razor sharp BUT in her right ear there is one frequency that she can't hear." What does that mean? "Do you think it was from trauma or too loud sounds?" He said that it wasn't and that it is so mild that she probably never even noticed it. He said that while not rare, it wasn't common to have the type of hearing loss that she has. He said it probably was genetic. So now we will go every year to make sure her hearing remains stable and doesn't get worse. If it gets worse over time then a hearing aid would be an option. Then he was talking about old people with hearing loss getting depressed. :( I don't want my kid to be a depressed old lady someday. So for now we just watch and monitor. 

Later that night I pulled up a news story on the internet. I turned it up because I couldn't hear it. My daughter looked at me and said, "YOU are the one that can't hear - not me!" hahaha. It probably IS my s**tty genes. Oh well, you get what you get.