Our reaction-

Well, to be honest, when we heard the news, we were devastated. Not because of the results, but because we had NO idea how to be the parents of a deaf child! I knew how to sign a couple of letters from the alphabet, but that was it. We didn't know what to do as far as doctors appointments, how would we communicate with her, what would we tell everyone, what about school?! All of these thoughts, and many more, were flooding through our minds all at once.  The drive home from the hospital, we stopped at chili's to eat and talk. But we mostly just sat there and wondered what had happened. I was so afraid that I wasn't capable of being the mom that she needed. I wondered if it was something I had done. Maybe I had rolled too far onto my stomach when I was pregnant, maybe I was walking too much? I didn't have a clue how this had happened!

 

The best way I can describe it looking back, was just complete fear of the unknown. 

The news.

The way hospitals do things now-a-days is they screen every new baby's hearing. (They didn't used to test newborns unless there was an apparent reason to.) So while they rolled our new bundle of joy out of the hospital room to run some tests, Jon and I tried to catch some shut eye. When she came back the nurse let us know she had failed her hearing screen and that it was probably a false reading due to the fluids still in her ears. One more test before we went home came up with the same result, so we were referred to an Audiologist at Utah Valley Hospital.

We weren't all that concerned bringing her home because of what the nurse told us about the fluid in her ears. So my mom, my sister and I took Edyn down to the Audiologist and strangely enough for us, the test that can detect fluid in her ears came back negative.

My heart felt like I had a ton of bricks in it as we were leaving the testing room. All we wanted were answers but, of course, there was more waiting.

We went back to the hospital to have an ABR (Auditory Brainstem Response) done which is a 2 hour test. We hear with our brains, our ears are just the pathway to signal to the brain that we are hearing something. So this test measures her brains response to the sounds coming through the headphones. As you can imagine we were a sack of anxiety waiting in the silent (all except for the squeakiest chair that I happened to be sitting in) room.

 

 

 

The results from this test were not as we had hoped. She has profound hearing loss in her left ear, which means it's not likely she will ever be able to hear out of that ear, and in her right ear she has moderate-severe hearing loss, which means she can't hear our voices, but if a dog were barking right next to her, or if an instrument such as a piano was being played next to her, there's a chance she could hear it.