One Month of Hearing!

It's been one month since Everly's activation.  As you can imagine, her world has exploded! In the first weeks after activation, Everly has shown a lot of different and new reactions to voices and sounds. We have been diligent in our observations as to which sounds elicit a happy or curious reaction and which sounds startle her. It's amazing the difference we have seen in just one month. Everly definitely responds to Cooper's barking, clapping, knocking, singing and playing the piano. In the last week or so, she's really starting to respond to our talking voices.  It can be confusing for her to differentiate between new sounds, voices and noises in these beginning stages. She hears better and responds more in a quiet room without too much background noise.

On Friday, we had another mapping session with her audiologist at USC. They tested her current settings and made some adjustments to her programming. She did remarkably well. No tears this time! Well, I had some tears but that's a normal occurrence for me these days :) We were told that Everly has access to hear most of our speech sounds. She did not respond to the softest and highest frequency speech tones but we believe she has access to hear those sounds and didn't respond because she doesn't recognize them as sounds yet.  That's where the therapy comes in.

Below is a video of her one month mapping session. You can see her clearly responding to the beeps. It may not look like much but this is an immense improvement from just one month ago.

We couldn't be happier with her results thus far. I can't even imagine how she's going to impress us in the future. I can't wait.