Introduction

Hello all,
I am a hearing mother of an 18 month old deaf son named Isaac. Isaac passed his newborn hearing screening but my husband and I noticed that he was not reacting to any noise. I would sing to him in his crib in the morning and he wouldn't awaken unless I touched him. So one day, I started singing louder and louder until I was screaming.....there was no response from him. I told the pediatrician my concerns so she held an electronic device over Isaac's head to see if he would react to these silly electronic sounds. He blinked his eyes a few times, so she said he was ok. She told me that newborns blink as a reaction to sound. I still had my doubts.

We finally took him to get an ABR test when he was 4 months old. We had to have him re-tested because he was awake for the first test. Finally when he was 6 months old we learned that Isaac was profoundly deaf. We applied for medical assistance to get hearing aids for him and finally got approved when he was about a year old.

Hearing aids did not provide any benefit for him, so we looked into a cochlear implant. After many tests and visits to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) we learned that Isaac was a candidate for a Cochlear Implant. We decided to implant him with the Cochlear Corporation's Nucleus Freedom model. We chose the color blue. Isaac will be implanted on September 25th, 2006.