April
2008
Auditory neuropathy0
Way back when Dorrie was still in the ICN, we had our first adventure with trying to get her in to see audiology after her hearing screening tests would not give us a result. It took us a great deal of wrangling to get down there at all, and of course, the trip did very little since she was upset and uncooperative by the time the test was ready to occur. Our second test was a few weeks later, and sedated, after snow allowed some cancellations. At the time, the results were inconclusive, and the main result was that she had tubes placed in her ears when she got her G-tube put in.
She was supposed to have a follow up hearing test about two weeks after the tubes had gone in, but we weren’t able to get another appointment before we went home. And then our second appointment didn’t happen because Dorrie was not feeling like going in the car on the day it was to take place. So since we’ve been here and she’s been on the road to recovery, we’ve been harrassing our doctors to harrass audiology to try and get us in before we leave once more.
It seemed like it might not happen, and we’d even gone so far as to make a regular appointment in June, but suddenly on Thursday they called up and within an hour someone was here to try and repeat her ABR test. We gave her a bunch of versed to try and quiet her down enough to do it, and for a while it seemed like she wasn’t going to let us, but at the last possible moment she went to sleep and the test was successfully performed.
The result was that the ABR patterns observed suggest that she has auditory neuropathy (also called auditory dis-synchrony). Unfortunately, that’s all they can tell from the patterns; they do not know how to read them to judge if she has any associated hearing loss, the severity of the AD/AN, or anything else. The diagnosis is very specific and yet extremely vague at the same time — it boils down to: we’re pretty sure she can hear sounds, but we don’t know how well she hears them or when she does, what she hears (ie, if what her brain is told is what the sound actually was). And we can’t really find out until she gets old enough to indicate these things to us.
It’s possible an MRI of her ears might give us some more information, but we haven’t talked to the ENT yet (he was on vacation last week) to hear what his opinion about physical causes might be. We’ll have a follow up visit with audiology over the summer sometime to see if we can get any more information. She may be old enough by that point to at least look in the direction of sounds to let us know she’s hearing them.