Aural Rehabilitation Therapy

Last week was our initial Aural Rehab Therapy (AR). It was more of a goal setting and determination session more than an active therapy. Which was actually a positive because Elias was not having the best of days for some reason. His therapist has been doing this for many years and actually helped start the AR program at Children’s. So her experience will be of value.

We are pleased with her pragmatic approach that she wants to take with Elias! Her words to us about this scenario is that we will need to be constantly re-evaluating his progress and be willing to switch and change things as needed. She does not want to go into this with the philosophy of having to give something “x” amount of time to determine if it is a success or failure. She mentioned that the varying opinions spanning a very large spectrum without any real consistency was a touch frustrating to her. So she could only imagine how we felt. That was reassuring. She also was a little taken by the fact that no one had pushed for this AR to begin sooner. She feels like we should have been doing this since March or April when it was suspected the BAHA was not working properly. We laughed when she said this because we completely agreed and had been asking why this whole time. We shared our thoughts that the audiologist was so determined to prove us wrong because as parents we can not know such things that the end result got lost. The therapist agreed that it was needlessly lost time and for what purpose? There will be many people involved with this process indirectly. They will not be present at the sessions but will be involved in the evaluations. We will be video taping every session for that purpose. This will also enable our therapy team at home to be a part of implementing strategies and providing feedback. She wants a total team approach to this. She did also take the time to remind us that this may not solve the issue or even happen quickly, but that she was happy we were willing to take the time for this opportunity. One thing we can say is that the team overall is comprised of only individuals that truly want to help Elias succeed. There are none of the nay-sayers that have obstructed his progress. We know that if this does not work it will not be because we were too focused on making something work that was never intended to. If this does not work we also have the components in place that should still help Elias to communicate regardless.