Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein. I’m so excited you’re here for the All About YOU episode. Every other episode is all about YOU! Your responses, your comments to the episode, your comments on Instagram and on Facebook, or any emails you guys send me that you want me to share with everyone. That way this entire podcast project is a conversation and it’s a dialogue between all of us learning from one another. That’s what it’s all about.

In the last episode, All About BAHA, we learned about the bone-anchored hearing aid and we also got to hear the incredible story of Abbi, mother of five, who told us about her son who was born with microtia, and the process of getting a BAHA, in addition to lots of other inspiring and interesting things that she shared with us. So if you missed that episode, head on back to the previous one and then come back to listen to the responses here.

So one of the responses that I got on Instagram was from a mother of a child who is using the soft band BAHA, the BAHA that sits on a headband and she wrote something that made me giggle and I thought that you guys would appreciate it.

She said, “We use the band with our son’s BAHA. Growing up, I hated listening to the rules, LOL, I didn’t want to get the surgical ones because I want him to make the decision.” She continues to write, “If he’s sick of listening to my nagging, he can tune me out. All jokes aside, he complained a few times with noisy environments, of headaches and it being too noisy while wearing the BAHA. I’m waiting for him to be older before making permanent decisions.”

I really appreciated this comment and hearing from her because it is a very big decision and in fact, we want the children to be a little bit older so that they are ready for the surgery and their skull has finished growing, so about age 7 or 8 like we mentioned in the previous episode. But also she makes a good point that it is the kind of decision that a child can have input into as opposed to the cochlear implant where a child would otherwise have little to no access to sound and time is really of the essence. Many times children who are candidates for BAHA have some degree of hearing loss and so the stakes are a little bit lower in that case.

Recently, I have started working with cochlear implant patients when I joined the team at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel and I’ve been doing a lot of training and I”m jumping into the world of cochlear implants from the perspective of clinical audiologists and of course there is so much to learn. All of the technical aspect but you know, what I’m all about is making sure that the patient experience and the family is experiencing something positive that will lead to great outcomes for the family and for the patient of course.

So one of the things that I saw can go different ways, depending on which audiologist is running the session, I have seen a difference where some audiologists on the day of activation, on the day that the person is coming in about a month or so after their surgery, they are coming in to get the implant for the first time and they are getting an entire knapsack full of the equipment, backups, batteries, chargers,