Our first diagnosis was day one and in the hospital, which was he failed his initial
hearing screening.
As an engineer that just puts you in mode of okay, what is next?
How can we solve this?
What’s the best thing we can do for our child today?
You get online and you talk with different families in the area and you quickly find
out Boys Town is tops.
It is one of the premier facilities for children with all sorts of issues that they may have.
So at a month we were at Boys Town.
We understood right then with the first ABR what our path was going to be.
It was going to be hearing aids up until he could get the cochlear.
From the first visit Boys Town felt right.
It felt like where we needed to be.
It felt like where he was supposed to be for his care.
Your child has severe to profound deafness and there are solutions out there.
I think for me that was the biggest comfort, knowing at the end of the day they were looking
at solutions for Marshall and cochlear implants was that path for us.
"Bop, bop, bop." "Look, look, look over here." "Yes, good job!"
When he turned his head to the sound of that beep and looked at that wall where the sound
was coming from, that was great.
Seeing him react each and every time they used the tones, they used the words, those
kinds of things, it was amazing.
It’s truly a technology that creates miracles.
We’re directly between Omaha and Denver on the map and yeah it takes a long time to
get anywhere and so that is a concern.
We have two other children and to travel with children alone is an obstacle.
To travel with three is difficult.
Going every couple weeks was a challenge.
Every time we go, we’re seeing between three and five different appointments.
We’re seeing speech.
We’re seeing the cochlear team.
We’re seeing the ENT, the ophthalmologist.
We’ve seen pediatrics and it’s amazing for someone that has to take time off work
and travel across the state.
Early on we asked Boys Town what other options we had for speech therapy because in our part
of Nebraska there’s not a lot of speech therapists familiar with cochlear implants
and they were nice enough to point out they had their own equipment and we could participate
online with them and so we started zoom sessions actually pretty early within the process.
We started doing bi-weekly visits and we continue with those today.
Doing zoom for us is obviously saving us eight hours of driving.
It saves us days off of work.
It saves us going to Omaha.
Zoom comes into our living room.
We use our toys.
We use our books.
We use our, you know, if he wants to be in the toy room or out here in the living room,
wherever they want to be, it just fits to our environment.
It’s a great lifeline to have with Boys Town, to be able to connect every two weeks,
to be able to describe maybe some issues we might be having with the equipment.
We’re still new to the equipment and different things happen and it’s great to be able
to run that by somebody before the next visit where we have to drive all the way down
to Omaha.
"Duck" "Duck!"
That is the most exciting.
That is the reason we did this.
This is the reason we went to Boys Town is we wanted him to develop speech.
One word he is using really good right now is please.
Now it comes out ease, so we are missing that p sound, but we couldn’t be more thrilled
to hear a young child say please for a toy that he wants or a food that he wants.
For us, Boys Town has been phenomenal.
They’ve been amazing.
They have been everything we’ve needed in this last, almost two years now, journey and
we couldn’t have done it without obviously any of that team.
When you live in rural Nebraska you understand that anywhere is going to involve miles and
the miles for this one have really paid off because we knew what it was going to mean
for Marshall in the future.