When you have a hearing impaired child you have a few choices for how you want them to live their lives. These are the choices that we had to decide between.
Choice 1: Sign Language
Sign language has been the main form of communication for the hearing impaired in the past. This form of communication is good for people who have a child who is not a candidate for cochlear implants. Also, some parents just choose to go this route because they fear surgery or their religion prohibits it. Those who use sign language usually also learn how to read lips. This way they are able to communicate better with people who do not know how to sign.
Choice 2: Cochlear implant
The cochlear implants have become a large part of "treating" hearing loss. Cochlear implants are devices that are embedded into the head and have an external processor. This choice is for people who have severe hearing loss that cannot be cured by normal hearing aids. Cochlear has a great site that explains how all this works.
Choice 3: Hearing aids
Hearing aids work by making everything louder. This would be an optimal solution to hearing loss problems as it is the least expensive and there is no surgery required.
For Kairi, this was a huge decision that we had to make. We knew that we only wanted to resort to sign language as a last resort. We wanted our daughter to be able to hear and communicate with the world in the same way as everyone else. We first tried hearing aids as a solution. Unfortunately the hearing aids did not help. Kairi was still not responding at normal levels.
Fortunately for us, Kairi was a perfect candidate for a cochlear implant. As soon as we knew this, our minds were set. We also knew that we wanted to get her bilateral implants. The only decision we had now was to make a choice between the different cochlear implant brands.
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