The best thing that happened to me today was the moment that the audiologist testing my daughter’s hearing realized she’d made a mistake.
Wow, major relief!
My daughter is a daydreamer. She’ll be sort-of listening to you while she looks up at cloud shapes, or is watching a machine to see if she can figure out how it works, etc. Since she’s about to start the school year, we wanted to make sure that this was inattention and nothing more. So the pediatrician referred us to the local children’s hospital to get her tested.
Her inner and middle ear looked fine, so the audiologist led us into the soundproof booth. She arranged us so that she was facing my daughter through the window, with me seated in the booth behind my child. She told us that she was going to say a series of words and wanted my daughter to repeat them. After making sure she was understood, she put the headphones on and left the room, picking up a paper to shield her mouth. “Fire truck.”
Nothing.
“Playground.”
Nothing.
She fiddled with some knobs. “Ice cream.”
Nothing.
“Fire truck. Fire truck.”
Nothing.
The poker-face version of alarm was written across the woman’s features and, I’m sure, on mine. My daughter turned and gave me a heartbreaking thumbs-up, waiting for the test to start. I returned it, wanting to cry.
The audiologist returned to swap out the headset for another and repeated the test, with similar results. I thought, my god, we have bigger problems than I imagined. In my desperation it hadn’t occurred to me that the previous two scans shouldn’t have been so at odds with these results. Truth be told, I just wanted to grab my little girl and give her a hug.
She started another test, with wavering beeps that sounded like they’d been done with a theremin, like a UFO from an old sci-fi movie. My daughter was supposed to raise her finger with each sound, which should have been pretty frequent. She lifted her finger once or twice, but mostly didn’t acknowledge a thing. My brother is partially deaf and memories of our childhood flashed by.
Then something about the UFO noise made me look up and ask, “Am I supposed to be hearing this?”
“What?” The audiologist asked.
“Am I supposed to be hearing this? I hear it, very loudly. Am I supposed to be hearing it too?”
“Well,” she said, “Sometimes it’s so loud in the headphones that you can faintly hear the beeps, yes.”
“It’s not faint,” I told her. “I hear it all clearly, all around me.”
Oh, the look on her face when she realized she had plugged the test into the room speaker and not my daughter’s headphones!
“Fire truck.”
“Fire truck!”
“Ice cream!”
“Ice cream!”
The headphones had muffled the ambient sound, so things I could hear clearly over the speakers, my daughter could not. She does have a very minor deficit (borderline normal) in her right ear, which they’re going to re-check in six months, but her left ear was at 100%.
Whew! We aren’t always so lucky.
Read other answers by Amorette Dye on Quora:
- When was the first time you felt discriminated against because you were female?
- When was the time you were really scared?
- What is the most surreal conversation you have ever had?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2dhRJrs
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