The story continues...

We followed the audi's advice and got Tessa in at Johns Hopkins to see Dr. Niparko, who is an expert in his field. Upon looking at her CT films, he immediately told us that she had Large Vestibular Aqueduct Syndrome or LVAS for short (it's also called EVA, enlarged vestibular aqueducts). This particular issue causes a progressive hearing loss. Some people don't experience any hearing loss until they are in their teens or 20's and some experience it rather young, as Tessa did. He declared Tessa a candidate for a cochlear implant and we went ahead and set everything up.

On December 16th, 2004, Tessa had her first cochlear implant surgery. The surgery went smoothly, despite the possibility of a complication called a gusher, where a rush of fluid causes some difficulty for the surgeon and a higher risk of infection, I believe. At Johns Hopkins, the surgery was an outpatient procedure and we went home that day. By evening, she was back to her normal self. She experienced no complications, unless you count pulling large adhesive bandages out of a 2 yr olds hair. She was activated on January 18, 2005. What a day that was! She did cry, but it didn't take long for her to get used to her CI.

Through the first couple of months, we had typical issues that CI parents have. Tessa would sometimes take it off in the car and chew on the wire. We spent quite a bit of money buying new wires. That was probably our biggest problem. She really took to it rather quickly. Due to her signing vocabulary, she really picked up a lot of language fast. She already had the concepts down....she only had to connect them with the verbal language.

We have dealt with some other issues as we've gone down the road, for which she attends physical therapy, occupational therapy and hippotherapy, along with the speech therapy. Her language has taken off and now testing shows her in the top half of her age in receptive and expressive language. She struggles a bit with articulation, which we are learning is more of an oral motor problem. Her language acquisition has been fabulous. In fact, it's difficult to get her to stop talking to correct her articulation. She has some sensory and muscle tone difficulties that we are working on in the other therapies.

Also, Tessa had an implant put into her left ear in May of 2007. She has done amazing with the transition and it has really helped her a lot. In fact, during her testing this past month, the audiologist said she's never had a child who could hear so well with conflicting noise.

So, I think that brings you up to speed on Tessa's story up until this point.