February 10 -- Implants Date :)

Well, we have a date on hold for Ellie's bilateral cochlear implants. It will be February 10. Dr. Daniels does only 2 implant surgeries per month...Ellie has to be at least 12 months before she can get them. Her birthday is January 17, but both of the January dates were spoken for already. They said that if something is canceled for some reason, we will be the first one to fill in that slot. It is actually quite amazing that we are even able to get in as soon as February. Especially since she is still in the process of being evaluated right now! She had an appointment last Friday for an evaluation with the audiologists at Spectrum Health. They did a hearing test with her hearing aids on (and found basically the same thing as Jack usually finds at Shawnee Park). They also showed us the different devices that we have to choose from. Then, on Monday (yesterday), we had an evaluation appointment with a speech pathologist from Spectrum. She said that Ellie is actually doing very well with her hearing aids (not news to me.) :) She seemed quite surprised actually and was hesitant to say that she would recommend her for a cochlear implant. But then she asked me a bunch of questions and discovered that, even though Ellie is doing remarkably well for a baby with profound hearing loss, she is still only making "ah-ah-ah" sounds and she doesn't show any recognition of the meaning of words (ex: mommy, daddy, buh-bye, etc.) So in the end, she said that she thinks Ellie would do great with cochlear implants. The only thing that both people doing the evaluation said was that they might want to reassess her after she has had her hearing aids for a longer period of time. They didn't say anything for sure, and I think that Dr. Daniels will still want to do the cochlear implants as soon as possible simply because she does have a profound hearing loss and there is only so much the hearing aids will be able to do....Anyways, I hope that wasn't too confusing....

Tomorrow is our last appointment with Tim Burkhart (chiropractor)...even in the midst of all this testing and evaluating for cochlear implants, we're still praying that God might choose to heal her ears.

Thanks again for all your thoughts and prayers as we go through all this!