When James was in the NICU, they were never able to get a good hearing test so we eventually decided to wait until he was out of the NICU to get his hearing checked. A couple of weeks ago we took James to an audiologist down at Children’s Memorial in Chicago. Unfortunately, the audiologist was also unable to get a successful hearing test and recommended that we schedule an Auditory Brainstem Response, or ABR, test. We took James to have an ABR today.
The ABR test is used to see how the brain responds to sound. To successfully run the test, they gave James some medicine to put him to sleep. They put electrodes on his forehead and earlobes and then earphones over his ears. Once he was asleep, the played sounds through the earphones. The electrodes would record the brains response to the sounds being played.
The ABR results showed that James has something called auditory neuropathy. What this means is that James’ ears are “healthy” and detect sounds, but there is a break in the connection from the ears to the brain. They want us to follow up with several hearing tests every 3 or 4 months.
