This is baby Ruby (at about 2 months old). She was born on June 6, 2014 8:17pm at Cedars-Sinai and came in at 7lbs. 11oz. and 21.25”. She was (and still is!) absolutely perfect! Ruby is our first baby, so we were more than ecstatic to meet her. After passing the APGAR test and getting cleaned up, she was handed to us, and we were just soooo in love! Everything seemed fine and dandy, and we were excited and anxious to embark upon our new lives as parents to a normal, healthy baby…
That is, until we had our first newborn hearing screening at the hospital the day after. This should have been our first red flag as she failed the test in her left ear, but they said it wasn’t a big deal and that lots of newborns fail for no apparent reason. We were told that someone would be back again before we left the hospital to do a re-screen. A couple days later, they re-screened her, and she failed in her left ear again. And AGAIN, they were very nonchalant about the whole situation and said that there was nothing to worry about yet. Lots of newborns fail and get better - Something about fluids possibly being stuck in the ears and their ears still developing. Okay, no big deal. Nothing to worry about. If there was something to worry about, they would have given us more info, right? All they did was refer us to the audiology department at UCLA where we had an appointment scheduled for a month down the road.
On July 7th, Ruby had her first full diagnostic ABR test at UCLA Audiology (I’ll go more into detail about this visit in a future post). This is where we first found out she had a profound sensorineural unilateral hearing loss. Besides hearing a bunch of big words I didn’t understand at the time, I don’t remember much else from this appointment other than thinking that Ruby’s future and quality of life would be in jeopardy. We were just in shock. Why didn’t anyone at the hospital take it more seriously? Why didn’t we do more research beforehand? We were devastated to say the least. Then, we came home and googled the heck out of “unilateral hearing loss”, “deafness in one ear”, etc. The stats and stories that come up are scary. After diving into the blackhole of the internet, I was certain that Ruby was going to have trouble developing speech and language and that she would not do well in school…most of which I’ve now learned is preventable with early intervention.
Now, Ruby is almost 11 weeks old and has had a 2nd diagnostic ABR (at John Tracy Clinic) which confirmed UCLA’s results and has started the Early Start Program through LAUSD. We are writing this blog to help ourselves document this journey with Ruby as well as hopefully help others who are seeking advice and/or guidance by sharing our firsthand experience in dealing with our child’s unilateral hearing loss. We, ourselves, have had a hard time finding other blogs or firsthand accounts of parenting a child with unilateral hearing loss, so we decided to do something about it, and we hope to learn something about ourselves along the way!
