Can You Hear Me Now?

This morning brought with it the task of taking Lily for her hearing screening. After carefully reviewing mounds of literature on autism and realizing how significantly our child fit the descriptions of the red flags for the social/communication aspects of this disorder, we felt the hearing test was just a "step" in our journey to an autism diagnosis. We knew it was a necessary one as it was important to rule out a hearing loss, but we felt our child was hearing. She responded to sounds in her environment, she had language and used words such as "cat - meow, elephant, zebra and cow-moo". We felt assured that we would go, they would rule out a hearing problem and we would continue on down the road to our final diagnosis of autism. Maybe I felt this way because I have dealt with autism in the past, because I have seen the adult signs of it and because I knew my child perfectly fit the "social/ communication" profile of autism.

What we found out shocked us.

We arrived with Lily for our 9:30 appointment. She enjoyed pushing a little chair around the waiting room and sometimes looked up to watch "Dragon Tales" on the little tv in the office. The audiologist arrived and brought us back to a room full of testing equipment. Little buds attached to wires were put in her ears and she squirmed and kicked as they tried to get the necessary readings.

Then, Lily and I were put in a sound proof room where different frequencies of sound were played on either side of us. As she sat in my lap and I heard things like ocean waves, a woman talking etc, I saw that she never ONCE turned her head even slightly in the direction of a sound.

Upon leaving the audiologist told us that she felt strongly that Lily had some degree of hearing loss and that she may only be able to hear some high frequency sounds and no low frequency ones.

A scary, cautious sense of hope began to fill me. Could it simply be that my child has a hearing loss? Does this mean that with services and hearing aids my child could lead a complete "normal" life. It is frightening to find comfort in this hope as we don't want to set ourselves up for another crash of emotions like we just experienced. She has been referred for further evaluation by someone who can measure her brainwaves to see what sounds are registering in her brain.

So as hope remains alive, so does the sense of reality that this could be something more. And now the "bargaining" begins. Oh God, please let this just be a hearing loss, please give us hope that our baby will be okay.