2 Weeks Post-Activation

Last night's speech therapy was beyond impressive.  Brandt only missed one of the Ling-6 sounds (he thought I said "oo" instead of "mm"--it's always been his most-missed sound) and I recited them three times, so he got a 94%!  For the first vowel word list (kin, keen, cane, can, con, coon, kern, coin, kine), he got EVERY SINGLE ONE RIGHT!  And I repeated them all several times.  I decided to try a second list (high, hoe, hay, how, who, huh, ha, he, hoy, her) and he only missed one--huh and ha sounded the same at first.

On the list of 25 random sentences, he got them all right again, same as last time.  This was after he read the sentences aloud before I randomly recited them.  I said, "I bet tomorrow Ariel will tell you to start doing these lists without reading them first."  He said, "Let's try it!"  I expected he would struggle, but yet again he proved me wrong!  He only missed two words out of the entire list!!  Jim instead of Jeff, and Don't laugh at the little puppy instead of They'll laugh at the little puppy.

And I forgot to mention that this is all done with his eyes closed so he can't lip read. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

Today was the 2-week post-activation appointment. Brandt went into the sound booth for testing, this time the AZ Bio (sentences with different speakers) and CNC (one-syllable, three-phoneme words) tests that he has done in the past for evaluations.  Beth warned him, "it's going to be hard today, I expect it to be hard."  But for the AZ Bio sentences, he did so well that Beth told him, "You did such a great job, I'm going to make it a little harder--it's going to be softer."  He still did pretty well.  He didn't do as well with the CNC words, but I was really struggling to understand some of them myself.  When Beth opened the door to the sound booth, she had a huge smile on her face and said, "You did great, really really awesome!"

Beth took out Brandt's scores from May, the appointment I had missed because I had no idea he was being retested (and would be approved) that day.  He had previously scored 39% on the AZ Bio sentences at 60 decibels; today, he scored 76%!!! At 50 decibels, he scored 61%.  Beth said that she considers "success" to be eventually scoring 80% at 50 decibels, and she "has no doubt that he will get there!" On the CNC test, in May he scored only 8% on getting the entire word correct; today he scored 38%. For the individual phonemes, he scored 31% in May and 65% today. And he was tested at 10 decibels lower today than he was in May. Beth said, "You have exceeded my expectations--and your own." Then she told us that now the focus will be more on understanding than just detecting sound. Progress!

Ariel was very excited when we met for listening therapy. When we were first walking through the parking lot to the appointment, she yelled "Hey guys!" behind us. Brandt turned and looked at her and she was very surprised that he heard her.  During our appointment she said, "You don't realize the significance of your hearing me from a distance in the parking lot, but I do!" Brandt said, "Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but I had no idea it was you or what you were saying, I just heard noise." She said, "That's fine! Just the fact that you heard me and responded at all is great!  I have stood in the waiting room calling your name six times, getting closer and closer to you, and you were totally oblivious. You haven't had passive listening skills in quite a while. This is a big step."

He got ALL of the Ling-6 sounds correct, nearly all the vowel words, and all of the sentences. Ariel added rhyming words to our protocol: cat, fat, mat, bat, etc. She originally included sat but took it out, realizing that he was going to confuse fat and sat.  She kept having to remind him that sat wasn't an option, because he kept hearing it instead of fat.  Then she switched to a list of high-frequency sounds: fee, see, she, vee, zee, the. I thought these would be nearly impossible for him to distinguish, but he did remarkably well. Ariel and I were joking that towards the end, they all sounded exactly alike. I had no idea whether she was saying vee, zee, or the.  Lastly she read some short stories about animals and asked questions about them, and again he did amazingly well.

I'm still in awe of how well this is going. I guess after five years of torment in the Gray Area, we deserved some relief.