ENT, Round 1

Cribbing from a chat board post, so as to have it here for the record...

Peanut and Little Man had their ENT specialist appointment yesterday. We went because Peanut has had a persistent ear infection (it took 5 rounds of different antibiotics-- back-to-back-- to partially clear it, but she still has it). Little Man was pretty much just along for the ride (he has had some ear infections, but nothing near what Peanut has had).

After talking with us for a bit, the Dr. ended up sending both kiddos for hearing tests (we were at Children's, so luckily this just meant waiting there for the audiologist to be available). This was mostly to assess Peanut's hearing to help us decide whether or not to do tubes.

As it turns out, Peanut's hearing is ok, but she does need tubes because her membrane is not flexing properly.

What really shocked both Sylvia and I is that the audiologist found that Little Man has "significant" hearing loss. The Dr. said he can hear, but it sounds like he's under water and someone is talking to him from above the water.

Little Man is behind Peanut in language acquisition (he says 3-4 words to Pnut's 10+), but we never thought it could be because he can't hear!

The Dr. said there is a surgery they can do to try to help, so we're going to go ahead with that. LM will also get tubes at the same time to help ward off ear infections so we can preserve the hearing he does have.

Anyway, so that's where we are at this point. We're both upset about it all, but grateful that we found out about J's hearing loss now instead of months/years from now when he showed evidence of being further delayed.