A little thing called life got in the way of updating this blog for several months, but a steady stream of you keep asking me when I'm going to start it up again, so here we are. You can all stop badgering me now!
It's spring (finally) in New England, and the cool mornings and warmer afternoons mean...(insert drum roll)...condensation! The small plastic tubing that connects the earmold to the hearing aid can collect moisture in these conditions, causing all sorts of annoying problems: sound distortion, general funkiness and (the worst, for many reasons) itchiness. At night, while she is sound asleep, Hadley jams her finger in there and goes to town. Ahhh...relief. Now that she's 8 1/2, it's not cool for me to clip her fingernails to the quick every week, as I do to her brothers. The problem is that she can nick the inside of her ears, which then turn into uncomfortable cuts that hurt when she wears her hearing aids. Not cool at all. The only way for her ear to heal is to leave the hearing aid out...not exactly the ideal solution, especially on a school day. She usually can tolerate wearing the hearing aid at school for at least half of the day, then removes it and puts it away safely in her backpack. Not a great solution, but it's a compromise we can live with.
Yesterday morning she woke up complaining of ear pain and, sure enough, I could see the unmistakable signs of a little scratch in her left ear. I dosed her up on untainted Motrin, gave her the standard instruction to keep the aid in for as long as possible, reminded her where to put it if she took it off, and sent her on her way.
You're wondering where the story is here, right?
Late in the afternoon, after she returned from school and while I was prepping dinner, I suddenly heard one of my lights buzz. All of our light bulbs are now the CF kind and, sometimes, they make that irritating buzzing sound. I went room by room, turning lights off, listening for the sound, turning lights back on, but couldn't figure which one was the problem. It's an annoying sound, and I was already annoyed enough as it was (by the calls of "Mom, Mama, Mommy...he did/she said/he said/she did"). I took a break (to transfer laundry into the dryer; fun break), and heard it again....from Hadley's schoolbag. Sure enough, there was her hearing aid, partly on and whistling away merrily...nestled gently inside a case of Japanese erasers. I wish I could tell you that I was so relieved to solve the case of the mysterious buzzing that I moved along with my day...but instead I reminded/reprimanded Hadley to store her aid in the specially-designed-just-for-hearing-aids container and put in her specially-designed-just-for-hearing-aids dryer when she returns home. 30 minutes of listening to intermittent hearing aid feedback would make even June Cleaver lose her cool.
(and today...she's wearing just one hearing aid. At some point, you just have to admit defeat!).
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We've been having trouble with little scratches in the ear canal too. I took her to the pediatrician a couple of months ago because she had copious amounts of bloody ear wax and I thought she'd ruptured an ear drum or something.
ReplyDeleteI would have a heart attack if I found an aid in an eraser case!