Seth is doing really well.
He is finally back to wearing his processors every second he is awake after quite a while of the processors causing him pain. Turns out that he has been having chronic ear infections and they were affecting the way things sounded to him. So he is going in on Friday to get some longer lasting tubes put in his ears. This will be his third set. Fingers crossed that the new tubes will fix that and his ears can get back to normal!
He loves his preschool and is talking so much more now! I was walking out of the doctors office today and as I reached for the door handle he jumped in front of me and said "I got the door, Mom!" His expressive language is still delayed for a 3.5 year old, but his receptive language is right on track and he is making progress in leaps and bounds.
It's been a little disheartening to see him behind his peers, especially when it feels like we are always hearing about kids who are implanted early who never have a delay, but there are so many factors besides just his hearing loss...he could have delays due to his prematurity or something else, and he has had other developmental delays as well, so it could be that this is just part of life for him.
We know he hears very well, so the rest will come with practice and time. He learns new phrases and words every day, and he's making progress, so I've had to throw my own expectations out the window and realize that just like with everything else, Seth will do everything in his own time. (See: Not eating until he was over a year old, not crawling until 12 months, and not walking until nearly 20 months. The kid is STUBBORN).
In the meantime, I remind myself that Seth is first and foremost a kid. Not a deaf kid, not a delayed kid, not an implanted kid...a kid. A kid who happens to have cochlear implants. I'm so happy he has them, so happy to see how well he hears, but I don't want to let his implants or his level of speech define him.
Seth is a happy, funny, caring, wild, exuberant, mischievous little boy. All the rest are details. =)
Speaking of details, Seth's reactive airway disease diagnosis got officially changed to asthma today. We've been expecting that it would once he was older, and it doesn't change much, but Indiana's winter has been harder on him than I expected it to be. He's currently getting Pulmicort twice a day as a maintenance medicine to keep him from having issues and has been for months, but he's already had three bouts of bronchitis this winter and we've been having to do rescue treatments at night when his breathing gets bad. It's almost always at night that he has issues unless he is otherwise sick, but it's becoming more and more common. We're doing allergy testing when he finishes his latest course of steroids in case an allergy is contributing to everything.
Do any of you have experience with kids with asthma? I'm kind of at a loss. Ava has mild asthma, but it doesn't require much and she has an albuteral inhaler to use as needed. Normally it doesn't affect her unless she's already sick. Seth's asthma presents differently and it just seems like there must be a better way to control Seth's asthma than giving multiple Albuterol treatments every night on top of the Pulmicort but I don't know what it is. And to be honest I'm turning into a little bit of a basket case because he's always perfectly fine one minute and a breathing terribly the next and it's always at night after he's in bed and farther away from me.
So that's the update on Seth and thank you in advance for anyone who has any asthma advice for me!
