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My child has CI, almost a month now


Zekarias

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  • His CI has been turned on but we see no response which is noticeable. It has been a week since it is on. We will appreciate any experience by parents. Thanks
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  • HearPeers Heroes

Hi Zekarias, how old is your kid?

And welcome to our forum!

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I noticed you are in the US.  Are you connected to Early Intervention services?  Can your CI center recommend an auditory verbal therapist or a Teacher of the Deaf?  

Some audiologists are very very careful with activating young children and bring their current levels up slowly.

Can you contact your audiologist and share your concerns?  Do you have another appt soon?

Wishing your child the best.

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We do have appt coming, 26th January. We plan to share our concern perhaps we might also someone who has done it a lot and has experience. 

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Working with a therapist with lots of experience with young children and CIs helps a lot!

 

I will tag a parent who helps answer questions here too 

 

@suzcohen

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@ZekariasWelcome!  Our son received his first Med-El CI when he was 1 year too.  As others have mentioned, some audiologists start out with really low volume for children who are newly activated.  When you go in on the 26th, if you determine that is case with your audiologist, definitely share his reactions and your concerns.  Maybe jot down a few notes that will help the audiologist understand if your son is responding when you speak to him from behind, if you bang a pot from behind, if he looks up to your voice or a banging pot when your 10' in front of him vs. if your 3' in front of him, etc.  If the audiologist is only giving him small amounts of sound at each visit, you might want to ask if they can program 4 options with increasing volume so that you can continually add volume every few days before the next audiologist appointment.

In addition to seeing our audiologist frequently when our son was an infant, we also had weekly "auditory rehab" / "auditory-verbal therapy" appointments with therapist at our CI center to help train our son to learn to listen and distinguish sounds.  We also received weekly visits through a US "0 to 3" high risk early intervention service...where the specialist would come to our house and teach us how to draw our son's attention to sound, work on distinguishing different sounds (google "Ling sounds"), and basically find ways to build language into every day activities you do with your little one.  Those therapists can help you access the quality / volume of sound that your son is hearing as he continues on his hearing journey.  

Probably your first step would be talking with the audiologist and finding out their plan and sharing your goals with them to assure they are aligned.  Our audiologist actually gave our son full volume on our first programming appointment, slowly increasing volume until his eyes "blinked" which she indicated meant the sound was too loud.  She banged on her metal filing cabinet to see him startle and ensure the banging was not causing the eye twitching which would indicate she had raised the volume too much for him at his listening stage.  Each child is different; our son progressively lost his hearing over his first year so he had some exposure to sound whereas some kids who have been profoundly deaf since birth, find "full volume" too much on their CI as they adjust to the new input. Each child is different and each audiologist has their own method, so ask a lot of questions and share your concerns.  

We will be looking forward to hearing about your appointment on the 26th and about other questions that arise as you and your son begin this magical "hearing journey"!  Take Care,  Suzanne (mom to Max, 15-year old bilateral CI recipient)

 

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We have tried everything so far you have mentioned but there has been no response. We have also the volume controller (remote), used that to increase and decrease the volume as such we have seen nothing with that too. We have checked his response doing some of the things you mentioned but no response. 

The auditory verbal therapist will be coming to our house on the 23rd, this will be the first time and we are hoping to plan something for the next few months at least. We will also mention some of the things we have been seeing in case she will advice.

Otherwise, we are planing to ask many questions and understand what the audiologist is planing for the days to come. We 

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Is your child using Sonnets with DL-coils?  Are you using disposable batteries or rechargeable batteries?

When we turn on the Sonnets with DL-coils, we see the Sonnet itself blink to tell us the program slot we are in (one blink is program slot one) and the DL-coil blinks red until it is placed on our head when it should blink green to signal a good connection and then stop blinking.

These flashing alerts can be disabled by our audiologists.

The DL-coil also has an automatic power off feature that happens when the connection with our internal component is interrupted for a period of time.  When this automatic power off feature shuts off our Sonnets we have to pull down the battery door and push it back up again. In order to power the Sonnets back on.  Some parents have asked their audiologists to turn off this feature so that their children’s Sonnets do not automatically power off.

Did your child respond to sound at his activation appt with the audiologist?  If yes, and now he is not responding to any sound....there may be something that needs to be looked at with his Sonnets.  Do you have the speech processor testing tool to run through the tests?

Typically we start by changing the batteries.  Easiest fix and often solves the problem.

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