Baby's hearing test

In previous posts I have alluded to baby's trip to the NICU when he was four days old, and I promise to write about it sometime, but because he was given antibiotics at such an early age there is a possibility of hearing loss.  We had to schedule an appointment with an audiologist at the local rehab hospital to test his hearing.  They told us the test would take up to three hours, so we were not looking forward to it.

The first appointment was during our trip to the Jersey Shore, so we had to reschedule, but rescheduling became a problem too.  They told us not to feed him before the test, and that he couldn't sleep in the car on the way there.  We were nervous about keeping him awake, because when he needs to sleep there isn't much we can do if he's stuck in the car seat.  But his sleeping during the test is so important that for a child 6 months or older they will sedate them to conduct the test.  My wife and I talked about this and thought that we'd rather skip the test altogether than dope up our baby, but we got an appointment yesterday (he's now 5 months old) so we didn't have to make that decision.

When we arrived at the hospital he had been fussing for around 30 minutes or so already, and it was painful to withhold the bottle from him when we knew that he was hungry.  I know I was feeling a bit testy, and as we were walking across the parking lot I said to my wife that most parents bringing their children to these appointments are probably in a foul mood themselves.  It absolutely affects your mood when you're forced by someone else to make your child unhappy, especially when you know what would make them feel better but can't give it to them.  Baby wasn't so hungry that he couldn't be distracted by all the new things to look at in the hospital, and everyone there wanted to say hi and talk to the baby a bit.

When we had completed the check-in we went to the audiology area of the hospital and waited for a few minutes before being taken to a soundproof room where he would be tested.  It was a pretty cool little room, with the little dot holes in the walls and some big speakers built into the corners and some medical machines.  There was a little window on one side into a similar room where people could observe our room and I wondered what kinds of things go on there and if they sequester little kids and blast music or sounds at them and if it's sometimes scary.

At this point the doctor told us we could begin feeding him, and he started to fall asleep on the bottle soon afterwards.  While he was eating the doctor rubbed this blue gel on his head and attached electrodes in four places: one behind each ear, one by his temple, and one on his forehead near where the soft spot is.  I was a little worried about this for two reasons.  The first is because of the electrode's proximity to the soft spot where his skull hasn't fused completely yet, but they test babies often so it must not be an issue.  At least that's what I told myself as it was happening, but I also thought about things like power surges and the effects of electroshock therapy on the human brain... all things I tried to dismiss as the test started.

The doctor told us that the test they do in the hospital only tests one tone at one frequency, but that this test did a range of tones and frequencies.  Sometimes antibiotics can harm a child's hearing so they do not hear high frequency sounds, so it was necessary to do this more extensive test.

Once baby was asleep the doctor left to give us 10 minutes to ensure he's in a deep sleep, then came back and started hooking up the machines.  Each electrode has two ends, one that attaches to baby's skin and another that a little snap attaches to.  The snap end comes up a little so you don't have to press down on the child's scalp to snap them on.  Once they were attached she put something that was like a narrow ear bud in his ear and ran some kind of test.  Then she switched to another ear bud and ran another test over and over again.  Each time it produced some type of graph, and the doctor would click on one of the peaks.  Then she would do it again, click on one of the peaks in about the same place, then overlay the new graph over the old one.  She did this several times before it was time to test the other ear.

By this point a half hour or so had passed, and we were nervous that we would wake him up in the course of switching him to the other side.  I proposed that my wife hand him to me and I could hold him, and his right ear would then be facing up so she could test it.  He wasn't even out of his mother's arms when this woke him up, and he stretched and cried out a little.

I thought we were finished at this point.  We have so little success getting him to go back to sleep when he wakes up from his nap, and his eyes were wide open.  Usually we can tell by how he opens his eyes if he's getting up or if he'll go back to sleep, and I thought for sure that the test was over and we'd have to reschedule.  Or that we'd have to wait three hours and come back when he was ready to sleep again. But we gave it a try, and the doctor turned off the lights so we could try and rock him to sleep.

Amazingly he did go to sleep once the lights were completely out, and we were able to complete the tests!  She did the same things again to the right ear, then used some kind of machine that blew a puff of air into his ear.  She told us this might wake him up but that the test was almost over, and I felt so relieved that we were successful.  I didn't know what the results were yet, but just getting through the test seemed like an accomplishment.

The doctor told us his hearing was very good; the antibiotics didn't seem to effect his hearing.  She told us we could have given up if he hadn't gone to sleep again and tested him when he was older, but it was good to get it all finished right away.