Answers?

We are home. Leo is doing OK- just OK. It will take about a day for the anesthesia to get out of his system. So for the moment, he is like a rag doll, a cranky rag doll. He is only content if someone is holding him and after all he has been through he deserves extra snuggles.

We have some answers but with Leo nothing has ever been clear cut- we call him our man of mystery. He likes to keep us guessing. The audiologist spent quite a bit of time with us after the test explaining the results. It appears that Leo is not legally deaf. Yippee Jesus! His hearing level for moderate pitches, i.e. someone talking in a normal voice was within normal range. They did detect some hearing loss for high and low pitches, but will need to do more tests to determine the extent of the loss. They were not able to do one of the tests because the operating room was too loud? (I guess you can't shush doctors :)

Lots of medical terms were used, but the bottom line is Leo can hear if you are talking to him but he may not be able to hear the bird singing outside! We will follow up with audiologist in about 3-6 months to run more tests. Someday, he may or may not need a hearing aid device to detect those pitches, but for now we are content to know our sweet little guy can hear the songs we sing to him each day at nap time and bedtime.

Please Pray- we get answers

The other night we were playing the game of Life because apparently our own lives aren't interesting enough :) Leo loved sitting and "playing" with the family!

Tomorrow we need to be at CHOP bright and early- 6:00 AM! First his ears will be examined and cleaned by our favorite ENT doctor and then they will proceed with the ABR (Auditory brainstem response).

We were told Leo is deaf, but we know he can hear some. This test will give us an accurate description of what Leo can and can't hear. Because of Leo's difficulties with anesthesia in the past, they would not allow the regular ABR team to just sedate him and do the test in the office. Basically this test will be done under anesthesia with a doctor present in the surgical unit.

Please pray for Leo to stay healthy so the test can be performed.
Please pray that he has no difficulties waking up after the procedure.
We were told we would have to wait weeks for the full results, but we are hoping they can give us some idea of what they found after they are done.

On a positive note- Leo can now (when he wants to) get himself into the sitting position from laying down. We are so proud of how far he has come!

Court Today

We have good news! We heard from our Social Worker that all went well in court today. Next step, we wait. Our agency needs to get some paperwork to our lawyer and then he can apply for us to adopt Leo. This should all move fairly quickly now. We are hoping for a court date to finalize the adoption sometime this spring.

It's ok Leo, Ben is not our lawyer.

Hey! Where did he go?

Please say a prayer for Leo's birthmom as I am sure today was the second hardest day in her life.