Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Sophie quote of the day

Today Sophie and I were reading books before naptime. She chose an animal magazine (a subscription from Courtney's family--she loves them!!) about deer. One page read something like: "When the baby deer gets hungry, it drinks milk from its mother." Without hesitation, Sophie chimed in, "But I don't...because you're not a deer."

True...and true.

Just an FYI for family out there who may be interested (and so I don't have to explain this 10 times), Sophie had her audiologist appointment today. We'd been noticing some times when she she seemed to not be hearing well. A month after making the appointment, she seemed just fine today and lately, of course. But we went for it anyway. Sophie got to go into a sound-proof room to "play games" with Monica while another audiologist sat outside with me to listen/document/run the computer, etc. They put plugs into Sophie's ears and the lady outside with me spoke into a microphone that was evidently hooked up to Sophie's ears and asked her to point to different pictures. There were times she didn't respond to the prompting, which is when I noticed a low number on the computer the lady was working on (compared to the higher setting when Sophie did respond). It turned out that she was at a slightly lower than normal hearing range. They also did a test on her ear drum which revealed a "flat" reading. The audiologist told me that indicated likely fluid behind the ear drum. When we met with the doctor, he confirmed that, though he said there was no infection...just fluid...and that would cause poorer than normal hearing.
So, currently, we are going to try out antibiotics to see if that will get rid of the fluid. Then we will check back in a month to see if there is any change. If so, great! If not, we try something else. Ultimately, if we can't get rid of the fluid with meds, then we'll have to go to tubes. But that's a few months down the line.
For now, there's no pain or infection, and Sophie's got good language skills (a concern if her hearing would be deficient long-term), so we're proceeding with meds and hoping that will take care of it.
The doctor said that the fluid may not have been noticed before because it may not have been there before (though I think it has been there a while considering the hearing issues), there's no infection, and a medical person would have to look closely for darkened areas to notice the clear fluid behind the ear drum.
That's it for now!

1 comment:

Cassie said...

Good to know! I'm glad you were able to get her checked out. I'm so happy that it can most likely be fixed. Thanks for keeping us posted! I've been praying and will continue to!