Friday, March 21, 2008

I Hate To Even Post This-

but I might as well vent with all of you. Delaney (my oldest child, who should be the more responsible) lost her cochlear implant yesterday. This will make the third time she has lost it. The first time, she was at a friends house and I picked her up. When we got home I asked her where her implant was, and she said- I don't know. I was getting ready to hop back into the car to see if it been left at her friends house when I noticed the magnet from the headpiece STUCK TO THE HOOD OF MY CAR. No implant, no battery, just the headpiece. We slowly retraced our path, and found the implant in the middle of the road, intact. She was soooo lucky.

Then a couple of months later, she lost it on the playground at school (third grade). She looked for it everywhere. I went to school and looked. She swore, at the time, that it was in her classroom somewhere. They eventually found it, out on the playground but it had been run over by the wall ball cart. It was not working :( We had to use our one-time loss/damage waiver, and got a new one.

You'd think she would have learned. But sadly, no. Last night when I asked her to plug in her battery, she noticed that it was not in her backpack (problem one: Why is it not on her head, and stowed away in her backpack????). She thought it might have fallen out on the bus. O.K. So we get up early, and go to the bus stop, and search the bus. Not there. I retrace her path down the hill several times. On the fourth pass I spot it, lying in the road. It had been in the street all night long, in the rain. Her FM system had been run over, it's now in four pieces. Fortunately her CI is working, as well as the battery. How? I have no idea. I'm not sure what the school is going to want us to do about the FM system.

We are now taking away her hearing aid, and asking her to try to wear her implant only for awhile. I think this will force her to embrace her implant finally. She hears great with it, she just doesn't *like* it. She could lose her residual hearing in her other ear at any point in time. She really needs to become a better implant wearer. I think now is the time. We have really avoided this (and I think that was a mistake from the word go), but I just don't see another option at the moment. If it just didn't work for her, that would be one thing. But it does. Sigh.........

I'll keep you posted. Oh, and if you don't mind- keep your fingers crossed that there was insurance on the FM system. Bigger sigh......

5 comments:

Phantom Reviewer said...

And I thought I had problems with retainers! My daughter broke her 275.00 retainers less than a month after getting her braces off...made her replace them herself. Dont think you can do that with a cochlear implant. YIKES. Good luck I will keep my fingers crossed about the insurance.

Loudest Mom said...

Ouch- $275 for a retainer???? No wonder my mom used to freak out (although I doubt when I was 'young' they actually cost that much-LOL). Unfortunately the implant costs $7000 (the external part), and the FM is about $800. Any way you slice it, it's all a pain to replace (even the retainers :)

Anonymous said...

Oh, good luck!
Hopefully she'll get used to the implant without the aid very quickly, keeping our fingers crossed for ya.

leah said...

..and I freak out when a hearing aid goes missing! Yikes- I think I would have an aneurysm over losing a $7000 piece of equipment!

Jennifer said...

OUCH! I would totally freak...those things are SOOOO expensive! I think that making her wear the CI alone for a while is a good thing...so she can get more used to it...I hope that cuts down on her losing it!! ((hugs))