Have you ever stopped to think about all the sounds you hear in a day? We take for granted this very special sense. Your alarm wakes you up, then you hear the water in the shower, brushing your teeth, shutting the door, hearing the cat meow, starting the car, the music on the car radio, the birds outside, the siren on an ambulance, even the air conditioning. My only annoyance with the window air conditioner in ours and Lucas' room, is that I can no longer hear him breathing over the monitor. I used to be able to wake up and listen, but now I have to get up and check on him. He doesn't know my voice, nor his Daddy's voice, and he can't hear his cousin scream at the the top of her lungs. Today that was a good thing, because he was sleeping. But how excited I would have been, had he woken up startled and crying.
I try to picture a complete absence of sound, and it's so hard to do. The other night, I forgot to turn the sound on our tv back from the DVD player, so I had to watch the tv in silence (I couldn't get up at the time). It was so annoying! I was watching "So You Think You Can Dance." I tried to read lips, and I did a little bit, but it was just not the same watching them dance without the music. That's Lucas' reality. We watch the Baby Einstein DVDs, and he can't hear the music. At least it's visually stimulating though, and the puppets and caterpillar make him laugh out loud.
Lucas really hears nothing. Even after turning up his hearing aids, and wearing an FM system, he will not react to anything. Maybe it's a function of age, but he's had the hearing aids for 3 months now, and nothing. I try to elicit a reaction. I find loud things in the house and stand so that he can't see me. Nothing. I work on the ling sounds (ah, ee, oo, m, sh, s) that he needs to access language. I thought last week sometime that I was getting a reaction to "ah", but not any more. I just can't easily reproduce 90 db at home. And even if I could, it might sound like a whisper to him.
I seriously ask myself on a daily basis why God would have done this to Lucas. I really wish I knew, but I know that I will never, ever know. I hope that the pain will some day go away, but right now it's still very, very real. I haven't quite made it to Holland where I can at least understand some of the language, since there are many similarities to German. I'm currently stuck in French-speaking Belgium. I guess there's at least amazing chocolate and awesome beer there though. I'm still on my way. We will make it to Italy someday, I'm certain of it (or at least Italian-speaking Switzerland, where I think I like it better anyway).