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Cayden got his bilateral implantation at ten months old,
that was 15 months ago.
And switch-on was two weeks later.
He started responding to sound at the second switch-on,
which is three weeks after.
You could visibly see him laughing
and suddenly looking around
to see 'what was that'
It is like a different thing to him
and he was discovering new things
and he lighted up basically.
When we found out that Cayden had a profound hearing loss,
we decided to proactively look at what can be done for him,
so that he can develop normally as a child.
I am somebody who likes to be in control of things.
I started going on the internet,
finding out more about hearing loss
and reading up on the books that 'Australian Hearing' gave us,
to know what can be done for Cayden.
A cochlear implant was the next step we need to look into,
I started comparing the different products that are available to us,
and being an accountant,
spreadsheet is always the thing to go!
The spreadsheet that we created,
listed the different type of products from different manufacturers,
there are three.
And from those manufacturers we looked at how it works:
The lengths of the electrodes.
The number of nodes on the electrodes.
The size of the processors.
Special functions.
Accessories that you can work with it.
Support levels in Australia.
And when we went through that and assessed it,
also against products that are not available in Australia,
just to make sure,
we chose MED-EL in the end.
We speak multiple languages,
one of them is a very tonal language.
It is actually two dialects,
one dialect in Mandarin and Hokkien.
So both of them have different tones for different words,
so he has to know what we are saying,
or else it comes very hard to converse in those languages,
without knowing the tones.
The main push for us to go for MED-EL
is also because of its smaller size,
which will not be a burden on Cayden's little ears!
The cochlear implant has improved his quality of life greatly,
being aware of natural sounds,
being able to turn when his name is called,
that is a big difference from the days
where he was still wearing hearing aids.