Category Archives: Cochlear Implant

A Little Bit of History Repeating…

June 29, 2014 By in ANSD, auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, Auditory Verbal Therapy, Cochlear Implant, deafness, hearing loss Tags: , , 4 Comments

How many of you out there remember this blast from the past?

I remember the countless hours I spent wandering around the house with Alice teaching her to ask where things were…it’s all part of the ‘AV thing’. It’s so important if your child is oral to give them useful language not just vocabulary. It’s all very well Ollie learning the name for everything he sees or interacts with, but unless he has useful language around those nouns; adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and the like then the nouns don’t help him get what he wants or ask for what he needs. More importantly, they won’t help him tell his big Brother and Sister to go away when they are annoying him…

Don’t get me wrong; we have taught Ollie plenty of nouns: Our own names, those of his siblings and the names for just about every form of motorised transport there is. Ollie has a wonderful habit of stopping in the middle of the street to point out cars, buses, helicopters and planes in a manner not dissimilar to a famous Harry Enfield sketch (the one with the aliens) from the 1990s.

Anyway, Ollie is doing fantastically well. He has had a real language explosion of late and he is so enthusiastic with his new-found voice. He is certainly ahead of where Alice was at the same age which, given how well things have turned out for her, can only be a good sign.

Here we go again…

 

 

One year on….

May 14, 2014 By in ANSD, Auditory Neuropathy, auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, Cochlear Implant, deafness, hearing loss Tags: , , Leave a comment

We have just passed the first anniversary of Ollie receiving his bilateral CIs…

We are, therefore, now at the stage where we can start to make comparisons between Alice and Ollie. Some things are clear, she is calmer and more settled, Ollie is certainly more headstrong (he must get that from his dad) and needs running time as part of his day. Ollie likes nothing more than being chased round the sitting room, the challenge is turning that into a listening opportunity.

Having a toddler with bilateral CIs has presented some interesting challenges. Ollie still sleeps a lot so our windows are small, he also spends quite a long time in the car doing the school run every day. It’s no surprise that some of his first words are car park and school. He also spends the car journey pointing out the buses and lorries at every opportunity – bless him.

But, he’s also discovered the terrible twos. I cannot explain the frustration of dealing with a toddler, who has thrown £12,000 worth of processors across the pavement in different directions, whilst having a shout and won’t even put them back on so you can tell him off. The defiance is huge. He also dead weights himself whilst somehow managing to ensure that at least one processor is not where you thought it was. My fear of traveling anywhere increases tenfold when Ollie is involved. The car has also provided significant opportunities for tucking a processor into a little hole, causing another grey hair before 9am.

But most of the time Ollie is too cute for words, his new favourite words are cuddle and story. Dear Ollie, don’t listen to AV UK when they teach you naughty words like “no”, you don’t need to know that and I’m waiting for “I don’t like that” which is imminent. Language development is all about what’s useful and giving him the words for what he’s thinking, so clearly we need “I love you mummy” and no more of this naughtiness.

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