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Certified Auditory-Verbal Therapists® James G. Watson, MSc, CED 544 Washington St.
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Pediatric Bilateral Cochlear Implant Case StudyRead about AVCC student, Sarah Novick, who is one of the first children in the U.S. to received bilateral cochlear implants. "Sarah Novick’s world was silent until she was implanted at 18 months of age. In 1997 when Sarah was born, newborn hearing screening was not available in Maine where the Novicks live. Her family had no history of a hearing loss so it wasn’t until Sarah was 7 months old that her parents realized she was a very quiet baby, not babbling or gurgling like other babies her age. At first, doctors attributed this to a series of ear infections she had over the winter. When the Novicks finally convinced their doctor to test her hearing at 11 months old, Sarah was diagnosed with a congenital, profound, relatively flat, bilateral sensorinerual hearing loss associated with Waardenburg Syndrome. By Sarah’s first birthday, she was wearing hearing aids and began Auditory-Verbal therapy but was slow to develop speech or language skills. Even with binaural hearing aids, her pure tone thresholds improved only to around 65-85 dB HL. At this time, when Sarah was 15 months old, her parents decided to take her to Boston Children’s hospital to get a cochlear implant evaluation." To read more from Cochlear's study, click here to open the PDF file. |
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