Hearing Aids the Naked Truth

So my son Sammy has bi-lateral hearing loss.  Mild to moderate in his right and mild in his left.  This means that he needs to wear hearing aids as much as he and I can tolerate.  So when Sam was 8 months old he was fitted for hearing aids.  They take an impression of your ears and cast a mold from that and sent it to you in the mail.  The cool part is you get to choose what color your mold will be so we went with red and green for Christmas. 

As you can imagine getting an 8 month old to wear a hearing aid is about impossible.  He tore those things out and threw them all most the second they hit his ears.  If he didn't throw them right away he would suck on them, and then they would short out and die.  So our first hearing aid only lasted a month. 

We got our second set of hearing aids in March when he was about a year old.  After learning he is deaf blind and the duel sensory lose is a major thing and he needs all the input possible so we got the left and right ear aided this time.  We went with red white and blue molds. 

He also had a fancy test called an ABR which is a sedated hearing test that measures how well the brain is getting sound.  This is important because a 1 year old isn't always great at telling you what he can and cannot hear.

That set of hearing aids was by far my favorite.  They fit his ears really well, and we wore them all the time, then he out grew them.  We went for Green and White that time and ironically lost one of them on the campus of MSU.  We lost the other aid 2 days later.  Rather impressive since we had never lost an aid till then.   The good news is his aids are covered for 1 year and we had them from just under one year so we got new ones in the mail.

About this time an organization called Hands and Voices contacted us.  To this day I'm not sure what their purpose is but they came to the house and chatted with us for a bit and gave me a binder on hearing loss.  Funny thing is for us, hearing loss is just a stepping stone if you will.  For many parents hearing loss is the worst diagnosis they will have to deal with and I feel like they didn't know what to do with us since its only a small portion of our issue.

So now we have Yellow, Red and Black aids for Mickey Mouse.  The right ear doesn't fit into his ear canal very well and he gags when I try and get it in and for some reason he doesn't like to only wear one aid.  So we are waiting for tomorrow, he has another hearing test and hopefully he either does so well we can pitch the aids or Lori can help me fit the new aid into his funky ear canal or make us a new mold.