Eyes and Ears

Sweet HG had an eye operation on Wednesday. This was to help correct the alignment in her eyes. They look GREAT! We won't know for sure if this will be the final surgery needed for the alignment for several weeks, but they look good and straight to me! I'll try to take a picture of them tomorrow. They are a bit swollen still and rather red, but they look much better than I expected, to be honest. I imagined that they would be much more blood shot than they are. She has taken it easy for the last two days and is still rather tired. The hardest part is that she has to have drops put in her eyes (antibiotics and steroid) for a week, 3 times per day. She doesn't care for this at all! She did do better today. I'm sure about the time she gets used to it, it will be time to stop. She also cannot touch her eyes at all and so she has to sleep with these splints on her arms. She doesn't really seem to mind the "no-nos" on the arms and actually asked for them tonight! Ha! She doesn't wear them during the day, but she knows she cannot touch her eyes. If I see her getting close to touching them, I will remind her in spanish. She will then repeat it to me, telling me "No tocas!" That girl!
After the eye surgery, they did a sedated hearing test (ABR). We did not expect any hearing issues but did this at the request of the speech therapy folks. They feel that HG will benefit from a specific type of speech therapy but she can only receive it if she has no hearing loss. Well, the ABR showed a signficant hearing loss. We were shocked! It did not seem possible for her to have this severe of a loss and for us to not notice it at all. Yes, her speech is bad, but according to the initial/verbal report from the ABR, she shouldn't hear much of anything at all. If you have spent any time around HG, you will know that she does indeed hear you, often repeating what you say. Today we folllowed up with the ENT and his initial comment was, "Well, this is going to be an interesting case for sure!" The ABR was contradictory to some of the findings of the initial hearing testing done in his office with an audiologist. He said that if he only saw the paper report on HG, he would say that she could not hear much of anything at all and that we would definitely notice it. Since she was responding to his commands (in poor spanish at that!), he knew she could indeed hear better than the ABR showed. So, his approach is "let's wait and see." She does have a large amount of wax in her ears (he cannot even see her ear drum) and wants to work on getting that out before we go to the next step. He said that he thought the ABR "over stated" her actual hearing levels. So, we are grateful today for that potentially good news.
For now, we will continue to heal and continue to "work" on HG's development. She is doing SO well!