can you hear me now?

This last Wednesday, we had an audiologist come in to evaluate Tennyson’s hearing. Our speech pathologist gave us a referral because we want to rule out any hearing issues being behind his speech delay.
She brought a tympanogram with her to see if he had any issues with the eardrums that might be affecting his hearing. The machine is able to measure eardrum movement by changing the pressure in the ear canal and seeing how the eardrum reacts to it.
A normal tympanogram reading looks like this:

Which is what Tennyson’s left ear looked like.
His right ear, however, came out as a flat line:
 
This meant that his eardrum wasn’t reacting to any pressure changes. She peeked in his ear and noticed there was quite a bit of wax buildup, which could have been effecting the eardrum’s ability to move. In addition, he might have had fluid behind the eardrum, but we couldn’t tell that until we had the wax removed. We called the doctor once she left to make an appointment to get his ears looked at and we were very lucky that they could get us in the next day.
The appointment was quite a fiasco. First off, I’m never happy at our doctor’s office because the wait is ridiculous. I never understand why if I’m more than 10 minutes late, they cancel my appointment, but then they make me wait for 40 minutes in the waiting room when I show up. Once we got in, the doctor took a peek into his ear and agreed that we needed to get both ears cleaned out. This is where the fiasco starts.
We haven’t really given Tennyson much reason to trust doctors. He hates doctor offices. And he hates doctors. So you can imagine he was not happy when, in order to clean out his ears, me and one other nurse had to pin him down on his back to a table while another nurse took a water pick to his ears to clean out all the wax. The whole process took about 20 minutes. 20 minutes of screaming. They had to try three separate times to get all the wax out. Each time he thought they were done, they’d start over. Poor guy. He was a trooper, though, and we got everything cleaned out and the doctor was able to come back in. The doctor took one last look into his ears and found that the right ear had an ear infection.
The thing about having an easy going kid is that we never know when something is actually wrong with him. We’d have never known about this ear infection had we not been going through all the speech therapy and seen the audiologist. Luckily, we now have some antibiotics to clear up the infection.
We go in on Wednesday to see the audiologist again where she is going to perform some more testing on how he reacts to sound. The tympanogram could only measure eardrum movement and really didn’t tell us too much about his hearing, so this testing will tell us more about whether he’s hearing everything right.
We will keep everyone updated.