Having sat through the ear moulding the week before (with Alice having behaved like the perfect patient I might add), we arrived at St. George’s for the fitting of Alice’s new aids.

The usual struggle to find a parking space, followed by the usual late running of clinic only served to raise our anxiety to an all time high. Would this be the day that Alice finally started to hear? Up to this point, Alice has been unable to produce any meaningful language. She is a wonderfully happy girl – always smiling and laughing, but has never even so much as managed a mama or dada – just the usual squeaks and squeels.

Alice has a further set of behavioural tests before the fitting. On the positive side, she seemed to perform quite well, with some responses at 55db at varying frequencies. Is this a good thing we ask? Is having a profound hearing loss worse than hearing white noise at 55db? Here is the crux of the problem with AN/AD.

Alice is then fitted with her first set of Bilateral aids as per the test results. However, on fitting, they decide to crank them up pretty high. From the off, Alice has been very comfortable wearing her aids, only really taking them out when she is in the car or when she is eating.

That said, one month on and at the time of writing, her responses at home are no better and, if truth be known, I suspect the hospital didn’t expect them to work either. we will continue the trial for three months to see if there is any benefit.

Does amplifying white noise help with speech and language development?

In the words of the Cued Speech Association, Cued Speech “clarifies the lip patterns of normal speech by using eight hand-shapes in four positions near the mouth. In this way every sound uttered looks clearly different.”

Having already discovered cued speech as a recommended communication tool for those with AN/AD, we contacted the UK Cued Speech Association (http://www.cuedspeech.co.uk/) to find out how we go about learning. They pointed us to their on-line learning tool (http://www.learntocue.co.uk/) and promised to get back to us with some dates for the courses they run in London.

When we heard back (pretty promptly) this meant waiting until November / December before we could begin. Impatient as ever, we began learning online whilst we sent a request asking for at-home tutoring. This, of course, has cost implications, but would allow us to learn together, as a familly over a timescale which suited us.

And so we were introduced to the wonderful Catharine Seddon who is a fabulous teacher. Alice’s Mummy and Daddy and both sets of her Grandparents began to learn.

A pretty daunting task when Catharine first arrived on October 2nd and waved her hands around in time with a fluent pace of speech. Impressive to say the least.

Nonetheless, at the time of writing, we have had three sessions with Catharine and have pretty much learnt all the hand shapes, vowel positions and the dreaded dipthongs. Indeed, we have all now started cueing with Alice (just the basics like her name, her brother’s name etc.). Even Alice’s brother, Joseph, can cue ‘Mummy’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Alice’ (typical that cueing Alice and Joseph is rather like watching an octopus having a fit – I will remember this if we ever have another child and opt for a monsyllabic name!)

I have loved every minute of the learning (I’m a competitive so-and-so and am not usually better than my wife at anything) and we are now (after about 10 hours of lessons/online learning) getting fluent, albeit at a pretty slow pace.

Our thanks go to Catharine and the Cued Speech Association for all their help and guidance.