February 24

Well, it's official now...Dr. Daniels and his team discussed Ellie's case, and they agree that Ellie will be a good candidate for cochlear implants. We went for her pre-op appointment this morning. Dr. Daniels said that her ears look good--ready for surgery. However, he has a flight scheduled for Feb. 10 at 3:30 pm. It would be a tight squeeze, doing surgery from 8:30 am - 1:30 pm (if everything goes perfectly), and then trying to catch a 3:30 flight. So we both agreed that it would be better to try for another day. I wouldn't want him to feel rushed...and then if something went wrong, I would want him to be in town to take care of it. So, our new date for implants is Feb. 24. Disappointing, but less stressful for everybody!

We celebrated Ellie's 1st birthday on Sunday. Here are some pics...



Birthday Tutu



Ellie didn't like her cake....she just threw it at Opa.



Lots of helpers to blow out the candle!


Birthday cakes....my first experience with fondant.





Ellie's Birthday dance. :)

Good Results

We had Ellie's MRI and BAER tests today. The worst part of the day was watching as they had to put an IV into Ellie's little arm. :( She screamed like crazy! She kept watching the nurse that had done it to her...every time she saw her come in again, she would start to cry.

We will have to wait to get the results from the MRI...I am not expecting anything surprising, although I have learned not to rule anything out at this point. :)

I felt kind of weird going into the BAER test. I was just hoping and praying this time around for the result to remain the same (showing profound hearing loss.) At this point, if the BAER showed improving results, we would have to wait to do the cochlear implants...which would delay Ellie's speech/language development. The results were indeed the same as back in June...the audiologist was not able to pick up any sign that Ellie's brain was receiving the sound--profound hearing loss. So I will wait to hear from Dr. Daniels, but I am pretty sure we will keep the scheduled cochlear implants for Feb. 10.

Poor Ellie was so clumsy for the rest of the day. As she was waking up from the sedation, she would open up her eyes, but couldn't control her head--it was just very flopsy. When we got home, she would be sitting up playing and then fall right over. This is pretty typical for her at night (to be clumsy), but it was just very extreme all day long. Hopefully she'll have her balance back tomorrow!

Next Tuesday

We were able to schedule Ellie's MRI and BAER tests for next Tuesday, January 12. It will be nice to get them both done on the same morning!

Tubes

Hi Everybody! Thanks for all the comments! We have been thinking a lot the past couple of weeks about the 2 different devices. We have definitely been leaning more toward Advanced Bionics--we were about 90% sure we want to go with AB. I just checked all of the comments on my last blog, and I feel like it is a reaffirmation that we should choose AB for Ellie. Thanks again, everybody, for your comments!

Ellie got tubes yesterday morning. She was pretty fussy (and hungry!) afterward, but all in all, it went really good. When I asked Dr. Daniels about putting her hearing aids back in, he said I didn't have to...which confused me. I told him that she really gets quite a bit from her hearing aids and we would still like to use them if it was okay with him. He told us she can start using them again in a few days. But this got him thinking....He's not as confident to go ahead with the cochlear implants as he was a couple of weeks ago. He said he's not used to implanting children that have some gain from their hearing aids. (I think maybe he forgot that we had talked about this at our last visit...he didn't have her charts in front of him...). Anways, we will be going to the hospital to do another BAER test (the same hearing test we did in June when we found out about her hearing loss). We are trying to coordinate it with the MRI so that she only needs to be sedated one time. I really hope that we won't have to delay her cochlear implants, but at the same time, I understand that Dr. Daniels wants to be completely thorough. So we will see...I will keep you posted on the dates of the MRI and BAER test.