CIs For Children

Travel. Somewhere deep in our collective DNA is the urge to see new places and experience new adventures. Travel is an education like no other, and the more of this beautiful planet we can see, the more we can appreciate all that Earth has to offer.

At three months of age, my son Jacob was identified with bilateral profound hearing loss. I was overwhelmed by the diagnosis, and felt I had so much new information to learn while also learning how to be a new parent. I had so many questions. How would he learn language and communicate? How would he learn in school? How would this impact our family? How would Jacob’s life be impacted by his hearing loss?

I will never forget the wave of coldness that washed through my body in the seconds following my son’s initial auditory brainstem response (ABR) test. The Audiologist pulled up a chair across from me as I cradled my newborn, and I knew from the serious look she wore that our world was about to change. Thursday, October 17 of 2019 – Sawyer Cox, my 7seven -week-old baby, was diagnosed with Bilateral Profound Sensorineural Hearing Loss bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss.

It was a life-changing moment, hearing a doctor tell me that my little boy, barely 24 hours old, was probably deaf.

Our daughter Emmy was born with a profound hearing loss. Hearing aids were providing very little benefit and we quickly realized we needed a better solution. Our family decided that the right fit for Emmy was to pursue a cochlear implant.

Our journey from learning our baby has hearing loss to hearing aids and cochlear implants.

When we received word that my daughter’s cochlear implant (CI) was failing, we were terrified. What would it mean for our daughter? She has had been doing so well. She received her first CI at age two. At that time, there was a huge gap in her receptive and expressive language compared to other children her same age. Once she was implanted and receiving weekly auditory oral therapy, she took off. I could see the language gap closing!

As AB introduces Marvel CI, a new series of cochlear implant sound processors for adults and children, we caught up with Marc Secall, who was instrumental in the inception and development of the Marvel platform, to get the origin story on these innovations that feature many world’s-firsts.

My daughter was born profoundly deaf, and as we began to look into hearing aids and cochlear implants, I was thrown into a world I knew nothing about -- insurance. Sure, I had gone to doctors’ appointments, picked up prescriptions, and had been in the hospital when I had my children, but I never thought about insurance coverage.

As a newborn, our little angel Nora wasn't given any hearing tests, and she and I were discharged from the hospital soon after her birth. As days and months passed, we noticed that she had poor eye contact and wasn't responding to our calls and to hearing her name. By the time she was six months old, we took her to the doctor. We were hoping that everything was okay, but instead, what we were afraid of happened. After many tests, she was diagnosed with bilateral, severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. It was a shock for us, but that was God's will.

As a parent of a child with hearing loss, I heard the terms “advocacy” and “self-advocacy” almost from day one. I had no idea what that really meant at the time of Miles’ diagnosis. My uneducated perception of being an “advocate” was someone who protested for the rights of others. Was I going to be petitioning city hall? Did I need to print pamphlets? Well, maybe, but advocacy for (possibly) yourself, your child, and the eventual lessons of self-advocacy are steps to ensuring a rich and rewarding life ahead.

When our son Si Chen was born, he failed the newborn hearing screening. By the time he was three months old, it was confirmed that he had severe hearing loss in both ears. There was no one else in our family who had hearing loss, so this diagnosis took us entirely by surprise.

My spoiled little child Karim was born on December 10, 2012. He is my first child, and my pregnancy with him and his birth were among the most wonderful moments of my life. We didn’t suspect that he had a hearing problem until he was ten months old. At first, we were worried that Karim did not pay attention to us when we called his name. But the pediatrician informed us that this is normal. And when we decided to see a specialist doctor about it, he told us the same thing.