Diagnosis

The ABR showed that she had a pretty bad hearing impairment, but we could not get anything definitive at that time of what her actual loss was. We ended up going from Dr. to Dr., specialist to specialist. They would confuse us so much. It kind of wouldn't match up to what we saw at home. Mind you, these were the early days of internet and people just didn't google everything like they do know to find out tons of information and anything you need to know.

In the meantime, we enrolled her in an early intervention program after moving to the Birmingham area from Montgomery to be closer to better hospitals, Doctors, etc. Pete had gotten very sick when Ariana was only 6 weeks old. He had been diagnosed with Crohn's Disease. He also needed to be closer to his specialist who was at UAB.

The early intervention went well. We were learning some sign language, but she was steadily progressing in her speech. We could tell that she would be capable of spoken language. She got fitted with hearing aids as well. Soon after her hearing loss diagnosis, Dr. Woolley said that she should get a cochlear implant.

At the time, cochlear implants scared us and for one we really didn't know how bad or good her hearing loss was. It was always different. She always heard Pete even without her hearing aids. What a confusing time.

We ended up going to Sparks and seeing John Wright. We walked out of Sparks that day and FINALLY felt like we knew what her level of loss was. Did I mention by then she was around 22 months old? I had been a long road. I can't describe that feeling. He said that she was profoundly deaf in her right ear. She could only hear the sound of a jet engine. That is why she would always pull off her hearing aids. That was a constant battle. She had a mild to severely sloping loss in her left ear. He said that we should take off the right hearing aid and just let her wear one really good programmable/digital aid in her left. The right ear seemed to be taking away from the good ear. We did that and from that day on, she never took off that hearing aid. She would wear it all waking hours and started making tremendous progress.