On Monday, the kids and I headed into LA for Susie’s check-up with Dr. Luxford, the surgeon who performed the surgery on her cholesteatoma this past summer. As usual at the House Institute, we arrived half an hour before our appointment time in order to have her hearing tested. Over an hour later, Susie was called back for her hearing test. I stayed out in the lobby with the other kids and supervised homework, so this was the first time that I didn’t get to observe her hearing being tested. It took under half an hour this time, and then we only had to wait another half hour to go see Dr. Luxford. As soon as he looked into her ear, he said, “Aha! I see why her hearing is so much better than we expected.” If you recall, he had to remove both the first two little bones in her right ear, as they were being destroyed by the tumor. With nothing connecting her stirrup bone to the ear drum, there was nothing to conduct sound waves on that side. We noticed at first that her hearing was indeed much worse on that side, but it has slowly been getting better, and now we know why!
Susanna’s ear drum has actually grown down and attached itself to that remaining third bone of her ear. So she has a clear conduction route for sound waves from the ear drum right into her ear. If a normal ear tests in the 0-25 range (her good ear is usually a 4 or 5), her bad ear tested at a 33. Dr. Luxford said he didn’t know that reconstructive surgery would be able to get much better than high 20s, which means that for now, we’re not doing surgery! We’ll follow up in 9 months and retest the hearing to see if it has continued to improve or if it has regressed. I’m not sure that we’re putting off reconstructive surgery forever or just for now, but regardless, we’re very happy with this news.
To celebrate (and to reward the kids for sitting patiently in a boring waiting room for over two hours), we went out to the Cheesecake Factory before attending the special showing of The Riot and The Dance with the Whites! It was a very long but very happy first day back into the grind.