Center For Hearing and Communication

We traveled downtown to the Center for Hearing and Communication and met with Lois Kam Heymann, a speech and language pathologist with over 30 years experience working with young children, to discuss their program. The Center offers twice-a-week, one-hour speech and language therapy sessions through Early Intervention as well as the Deaf Infant Program (DIP). Lois showed us around the Center and we were impressed by the bright green and blue walls, the children's drawings and the fun toys. We also met several of the speech pathologists who were all warm and welcoming. We felt this would be the perfect place for young Hannah to come and learn how to listen, speak and play with other children. There was also lots of laughter from the other children who seemed right at home.

The Ear Institute and an ABR

We took Hannah back to the Ear Institute at New York Eye & Ear for the auditory brainstem response (ABR) test on July 8. This test has to be done while Hannah is asleep. Michael and I kept our little girl hungry and awake. Not an easy task for anyone, especially a 7-week old baby. But it was worth it. She sleep through the two-hour test, only waking for about 20 minutes. The audiologist put more probes in her ears and tiny electrodes on her forehead. All we could do it sit and pray that the audiologist would get some response. When all was said in done, the audiologist explained that sometimes the newborn hearing screening doesn't accurately tell the whole story and that she double checked all the equipment to make sure the test was done correctly. All I could think about was this was all a mistake and we could take our little girl home. Then she dropped the bomb on us. Hannah had profound sensorineural hearing loss in both her right and left ears. I don't remember much that she said afterward. She handed us a piece of paper and told us a little bit about the hearing banana. Basically Hannah could be in front of a jet airplane and maybe she could hear it.

Hannah was fitted for her hearing aids. They inserted a greenish goop in her tiny ears to take a mold impression. At the same time, we met with the Early Intervention Coordinator who explained about Hannah's speech therapy sessions offered at NYEE.