The Cerebral Mum

We finally had the ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat) Clinic appointment yesterday and met the surgeon who’ll be putting the grommets in to fix to Caspar’s hearing at the same time he has his palate repair. I say finally because the hospital scheduled the clinic for me in March without bothering to notify me. Plastics has to wait on ENT before a surgery date can be set and I was worried about the delay. The longer we wait the more behind he gets in terms of language development. His file still has a rough time frame of midyear though, which is great but may coincide with Mum’s visit and I’m in two minds about that.

She’ll be here for most of July and while it would be nice to have someone to visit us while we’re in hospital (It’s a 5 day stay for both of us), it would also be nice to spend all of that time with her. There are no guarantees when the surgery will be, however, and when it comes down to it, sooner is better than later.

Cas is on the waiting list as Category 2 - Semi-urgent so the surgery should take place within a 90 day window. I do know that some other cleft patients haven’t had their surgery until 12 months old, but I’m feeling pretty hopeful we won’t have to wait that long. I’ll get a letter 2-3 weeks prior, so I’ll just keep checking the mail and be ready to go when we have to go.

But back to the appointment…

We had the audiology tests yesterday as well, so I don’t have to go back to the hospital next week. Now that he’s older the tests are much more fun. The newborn tests are done while sleeping and take forever because getting a baby to sleep while things are being poked into their ears and electrodes are stuck to their head is something of a challenge. The tests yesterday could actually confirm (rather than “indicate”) that there is fluid in his ears limiting the movement of the ear drum which shows that there is a conductivity problem rather than a sensorineural one that can’t be fixed. Almost all cleft babies have this problem and once the grommets are in the ENT surgeon told me that it is 99.9% sure that his hearing will be perfectly normal.

There was also another test done to measure his response to sound. Caspar faced the audiologist while she played with toys and made faces at him and the volume of a speaker was slowly adjusted to measure when he would turn to see where the sound was coming from. When he turned he was rewarded by a box lighting up and flashing to reveal a toy cow. Unsurprisingly, he did need the volume higher than a baby with normal hearing before he would respond, but I was quite proud of him anyway as this test is not usually reliable until the baby is ten months old. He might not hear perfectly yet, but he’s smart!

We also had his weigh in at the Maternal Health and Childhood Centre this morning. His current stats are:

Weight: 9.41 kg (75th percentile)
Length: 69 cm (75th percentile)
Head Circumference: 46 cm (90th percentile)