SUCCESS!

Monday October 22 was the day of truth for James. We turned on his cochlear implant. The first thing they did was run some impedence runs to make sure the implant and electrodes were working. Those all went really well.  They explained that the turn the implant on in levels called "units". Units of what I have no idea...but units they are. The impedence runs they did were at a level of 30 units and we saw no reaction (not uncommon at all) so we knew at 30 units he wasn't hearing anything. Most people when they are done with fine-tuning the programming are between 150-350 units. So they slowly increased it from 30 units to 35 and so on until we saw some response. He let us go up to 100 units and he wasn't too fond of that so we backed off to 90 units and left it there for the first day.
To say it was exciting would be and understatement. Watching that amazing little react to sound for the first time was incredible. You could see the look on his face-a little bit of confusion and him looking around. We even got a little bit of a smile after a bit. We're so excited for the world that this opens up for James. Even if he won't be able to talk to us, he'll now be able to hear us and the world around him. I can't even imagine not hearing my mother's voice or the sound of rain. How exciting for him!
The first day we left it at 90 units and kept the implant on as much as we could. He did really well with and didn't seem bothered by the sound. At one point he was taking it off constantly-but he thought it was funny and a fun game to play with mom.
The second day we put it back on again and headed to the doctor's office. While in the waiting room Elliot was playing and there was a little girl there too. She wanted to know his name and her dad told him to go ask him. She asked him and he proceeded to ignore her. A few minutes later she tried again and this time he actually answered. "My name's Tony" Now, if you know Elliot you'll know that he loves Ironman (about as much as Spiderman) and of course Ironman's name is Tony Stark-so that's where he got it from.
Back to James-once in the office we slowly increased the units. We watched him for negative reactions to see if we'd gone too far. They were hoping to get up to 120-130 units-he blew them away and allowed them to go up to 150 units! He got up to 170 units before he got really mad. So they left it at 150 and slowly each day we increase the volume in the morning and see if he's ok with it. If he is we leave it there and if not we go back to where we were before. We'll be back to Mayo the 7th of November and hopefully we'll be increasing some more. We're hopin to be up to 170 units by then.
Everyone is so excited for James to hear! His teachers, therapists, friends at school...we're so excited for him! I'm attaching a couple of pictures. one of them picture that shows the "microphone" piece that goes on his head (it attaches by a magnet-the piece inside his head has a magnet) and the cable connects it to his processor (which contains the programming, the volume and sensitivity). His pieces are pretty cool. Right now we're using green, but we can also switch it out to blue, white or beige. The great thing about it too is that it's waterproof! We have to use certain pieces, but that'll be fun for bathtime and swimming!

I'll try to get video up-there's one on Facebook right now.

I'm also putting up his school picture-super cute!