In 2019 our son August was born via emergency c-section 6 weeks before his due date. After immediate treatment and transfusions, he was transferred to another hospital where he received hypothermic cooling to help his brain.
In the NICU, Gus failed both of his newborn hearing screenings, and a few weeks later he was diagnosed with Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder (ANSD), leaving him profoundly deaf, as the doctors suspect, a result of the traumatic blood loss during delivery.
In the midst of the 2020 COVID shutdown, we noticed a dramatic shift in Gus’s response to noise – the dogs barking, mom coughing, doors slamming… A few months later, when the hospital was able to resume audiology appointments, the doctors determined that he was indeed detecting sound, and was now in levels of moderate to mild hearing loss. After weeks of additional testing, the doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital concluded that the ANSD was starting to resolve, a statistical anomaly.
I made this video last year when August turned one.
