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Welcome to Tessa's page. She was diagnosed as profoundly deaf at the age of 18 months. She received a cochlear implant in December 2004 and was activated on January 18, 2005, at the age of 27 months.
Journal
Thursday, June 14, 2007 10:12 AM CDT Just a warning now, this journal might be a bit disjointed. It's summer and both kids are home and playing, so I'm sure I'll get pulled away more than once. Tessa is doing great. She was activated on May 24th and actually laughed when they turned her new CI on. They take the old one off for the activation. She looked at Stephen, made a silly face and started laughing. Much different than the first time around, for sure.
A few days after her activation, Tessa got to take her first trip on a plane. We flew to Colorado to go to Uncle Chewy's graduation from the Air Force Academy. She was quite excited, while I wasn't a bit thrilled. I do not enjoy flying. As we were boarding, she turned around to the people behind us and said "My mommy's scared to fly on an airplane." Gee, thanks, Tessa. They were all amused, I'm sure. Then in the plane, she kept saying "Don't worry Mommy. I'm not scared." On the plane trip back, she kept begging to keep the shade open on take off and I did not want it open. My anxiety made it a bit more difficult to deal with the girls, but we got through it in one piece. Unfortunately, on the trip back, the airline put us in a row of seats we were not allowed to sit in. They switched us around, but then Stephen ended up having to sit somewhere else, so it was just me and the girls.
The trip was an overall success. The girls has a blast with the family. Tessa, of course, didn't stop chattering at all. She was very excited to see the whole family and still talks about it quite a bit. She thinks Uncle Chewy is a "powice officer" because of his uniform. The actual graduation ceremony was a bit difficult for her. I'm sure it was a combination of factors that resulted in major sensory overload for her.
We are learning more and more every day about Tessa's sensory things. There's some concern of auditory sensitivity, though there's not a whole lot we can do about there. There are ways to deal with it, but it seems quite ironic that we go through so much to get her hearing and then she is overstimulated by it. It's like she's two different children. One on one, she is just like any other child. She is capable of holding a one on one conversation and interacting normally, but in large crowds she really struggles to maintain control of herself. She also shows a lot of behavior problems when she is frustrated with something. We are working on hard on teaching her to voice her feelings and frustrations. She is getting there. She is doing much better at asking Selah to return her toy in a calm voice instead of losing control if Selah takes something. Also, when she can't do something, she will say "Mommy, I'm frustrated! I need help." She does still say it in a very loud squawky voice, but we're making progress.
She's doing great with her new CI. It takes a little while for the new one to catch up to the old one and sometimes it never really does, depending on the time between implant surgeries. Her audiologist suggested that we isolate her new ear without allowing her to use her old ear much. We didn't do that much until a week and a half ago and she has progressed much since then. She is able to understand all the ling sounds (ah, oo, ee, mm, sss, and sh). These sounds are used to determine how well the implant is functioning and whether she's hearing all the speech frequencies well. When we put her old CI back on, though, she goes into chatterbox mode. The girl doesn't stop talking. I'm not complaining, though. Her imagination is just soaring and she talks about all kinds of things. Her current favorite is her pretend puppy named Wags. Yesterday, Wags ran out into the road and Tessa wanted to go get her. Obviously, that was not allowed. She said "We need to get her so she doesn't get hit by a car." She's starting to get some of those concepts that we've been working so hard on for a long time. Overall, I'm very pleased with her progress. It is a bit difficult to require her to work on her new ear, when her old one is so much easier to use, but we know it will pay off in the end. I'm already noticing that she seems to be understanding me better, though I'm not sure if that's wishful thinking or not.
I better go, as the girls needs something to keep them occupied. We are looking forward to enjoying the summer and getting to do lots of fun things together.
Love,
Sara
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