Children, parents, and professionals in partnership |
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Family Stories: Oliver's Story
At the beginning, when Oliver was diagnosed at five months old, we only knew that he was “very” deaf. He was fitted with Phonak Superfronts straight away (this was in Johannesburg, where we were living at the time) and we quickly noticed he did have some residual hearing. Since then, until recently, he has hovered on the borderline for a Cochlear Implant. In South Africa Oliver had intensive Auditory Verbal-type therapy. Then we came back to Britain, and it was like stepping back into the middle ages. We were told that as Oliver was “only” two, he had no need or right to speech therapy, and got a fairly ineffectual fortnightly session with a teacher of the deaf. He developed terrible glue ear problems due to the climate, and his speech development plummeted. From a happy, vocal toddler, with an impressive vocabulary, he fell silent and became frustrated and angry. Then we heard about the Oxford AV programme (the old name for AV UK). The approach was much closer to the one we'd been following in South Africa. Not “hot-housing”, but definitely nurturing expression. Not learning to parrot back auditory discrimination, but enthusiastically showing that language is fun and useful! As parents, too, we just grew into incorporating language aims into everyday life. Oliver blossomed with this approach, gaining the confidence to generate his OWN thoughts verbally, and gleefully using speech to order his parents around. In time, however, as the demands on his speech and hearing grew in complexity, we noticed that Oliver was struggling to access what he needed. His speech was not easy to understand, and in noisy surroundings, he struggled. Our AV therapist gently broached the Cochlear Implant subject with us. To be honest, we'd been turning the question over for some time. We hated the idea, the irreversibility of it, and hoped that, with advances in hearing aid technology it would not be necessary. It was becoming obvious as Oliver went through nursery, and started school, that he might well do better with the implant. We were referred to the Nuffield department of the Royal Throat Nose and Ear Hospital, and so started a process that, ironically, had us, the sceptical parents, battling to convince extremely conservative professionals there that Oliver needed an implant. The problem was that against the astonishingly low expectations of what a profoundly deaf child should be able to do, Oliver was managing “surprisingly well”. We got lots of outside expert opinion, including our AV therapist and an excellent private audiologist, read research on the internet and talked to other parents of “borderliners”. Finally Nuffield offered the implant, and that's where we are now, with Oliver about to go in for his op. Of course we are terrified, as any parent would be, but we believe we have to offer our son the chance to do the very best he can, or wants to do, in life. It's been a long haul and it's not over yet, but hopefully, with the incredible support we've had from the professionals we've been lucky enough to meet, we feel confident that Oliver's got a bright and exciting future ahead of him. Fiona
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It seems much more than five years ago that our son, Oliver, was found to be profoundly deaf. From that time, when it seemed as if the world had collapsed around us, to today, when Oliver is a bright, chatty schoolboy, we've come a long way.