The Beginning...

Cal was born on Aug 26, 2008. He was born with absolutely no complications and the actual labor lasted roughly 2 minutes. He passed all his tests with flying colors except for one. Cal failed his first hearing screening. “Should we be worried?” we asked the nurses. “Absolutely not,” the nurses assured us. “99 times out of 100 it is just fluid in his ears. “Come back in 3 weeks and we will re-test him…”

3 weeks later we took Cal back to the hospital, and again Cal failed his hearing screening. At that point the hospital told us that we needed to go see an ENT (Ear, Nose & Throat) Doctor and see what was up.

This is the first point in which Brynn and I started to worry. We scrutinized Cal to see if he would startle to shouts, bangs or his 2-½ year old sisters screaming tantrums. But c’mon, he was 3 weeks old. We had no idea what to look for. The kid slept 22 hours out of the day. Permanent hearing loss didn’t even cross our minds. We had no family history, the delivery was textbook; worse case scenario was that Cal was one of those kids that would fight ear infections his whole childhood and would need tubes in his ears.

A few weeks later we headed to Primary Children’s to see the ENT. The doctor evaluated Cal and told us that he saw no sign of fluid and recommended that we see an Audiologist for an ABR (Auditory Brain Response) Test. This test measures the reaction of the brain to sounds. Off to another doctor…

At roughly the age of 6 weeks Cal went to see and Audiologist to determine if he had any type of permanent hearing loss. Our Audiologist was great. She sat us down, told us that this test would take up to 2 hours because the will test will make different sounds, pitches and decibels to determine if, or just how much hearing loss Cal had. She would walk us through the whole process. We settled in for a long day…After about 10 minutes of testing she slowly unhooked all of the equipment from Cal, looked us in the eyes and said, “It’s never easy to tell parents this, but…”

Honestly after that I have no idea what was said. Brynn and I just nodded our heads, thanked her for her time and walked outside. That is the day that we found out that Calan had profound hearing loss. That is the day we found out that our son was completely deaf.