Thriving and Coping With Congenital Hearing Loss--Twice

 

Our son Sean was born in 2000 in New York City, about a year before mandatory state newborn hearing screenings. My husband Des and I noticed that he wasn't speaking very much and that his sounds and words were short and unintelligible. But as new parents, we believed that he would speak when he was ready. That all changed when Sean, then 2, repeated a simple phrase back to me that in no way resembled the words I had just spoken to him. The light bulb finally went off: Sean needed a hearing test. We eventually learned that Sean was born with nonsyndromic sensorineural bilateral hearing loss.